EIAR 2019

The development and diffusion of social robots gives increasingly rise to ethical and legal concerns related to, e.g., responsibility assignments in cooperative tasks, implementation of moral rules in robots, possible dual uses and misuses of artificial agents, unintended modifications of social, cognitive, emotive and communication abilities in humans interacting with robots. The urgency of developing effective ethical inquiries related to these issues leads specialists to acknowledge the need to overcome classical approaches, based exclusively on philosophical analysis. Emerging trends are incorporating, within the frameworks of ethical inquiries on social robots, a series of methods, tools and scenarios defining empirical research in Social Robotics and HRI.

The main goal of the Experimental and Integrative Approaches to Robo-ethics (EIAR 2019) workshop is to discuss possibilities, limits and ways of this new orientation, with a specific focus on the role that experiments can play in addressing ethical and legal issues concerning (social) human-robot interaction. To this end the workshop will propose a number of presentations illustrating concrete pioneering experimental and integrative approaches in Robo-ethics, and stimulate structured discussion directed to their development, improvement and diffusion. The ultimate aspiration is to activate the process of constitution of an interdisciplinary community engaged in the development of a well-defined research line in Experimental and Integrative Robo-ethics.