Roboethics - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 76

Some of the unresolved problems associated with mobile robots involve the
following:

1. The development of effective location, mapping and navigation or SLAM-
equivalent algorithms which can be used outside, particularly in unstructured
and unknown environments, which have not been tagged, for instance, by radio-
frequency identifi cation (RFID) tags.
2. Improved stability and smoothness of gait.
3. Improved methods for each degree of freedom of motion of legged robots using
artifi cial 'muscles' which are closer to human and animal muscles. Currently
each degree of freedom is realised by an electric motor, a gear without backlash
and a high reduction ratio and a controller.
4. Signifi cant reductions in power consumption as well as the development of
improved low-cost miniature power supplies.

Improvements in the design and functionality of mobile robots will lead to new
applications, such as their use as 'agents' in the automation of production. There are
also many potential applications in the area of service robots. A very brief overview
of existing applications was presented in Sect. 2.1 . One of the areas with consider-
able potential, as well as a number of challenging ethical issues, is robots for elderly
and disabled people, sometimes called assistive service robots.

3.3 Service Robots

The use of personal and, to a lesser extent, professional service robots raises particular
safety issues. In particular the users are untrained members of the general population
rather than engineers or workers trained and experienced in working with robots. The
nature of many applications means that the robot is much closer to the user than in
most industrial applications. In addition, service robots are used to carry out activities
which are part of the user's normal lifestyle, making the wearing of protection intru-
sive and socially unacceptable. In some applications, such as those involving disabled
and elderly people, users may have slow reaction times or not be able to move away
(quickly) in the case of incidents. For all these reasons, service robots should be con-
sidered safety critical systems and great attention paid to safety features in the design.

3.3.1 Assistive Service Robots

Combining the defi nition of robot and service robot in Sect. 2.1 with a defi nition of
assistive technology (Hersh and Johnson 2008 ), assistive service robots can be
defi ned as an actuated mechanism programmable in two or more axes with a degree
of autonomy which performs useful tasks for disabled and/or elderly people to over-
come social, infrastructural and other barriers to independence, full participation
in society and carrying out activities safely and easily. Work on assistive robots