Roboethics - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 78

Robotic guides in public buildings may also be of interest to younger and
non-disabled people. For instance, robotic shopping guides have been trialled in
home improvement stores in Germany (Gross et al. 2009 ). A design-for-all approach
could ensure that they had suitable functionality and interfaces to be of use to dis-
abled and elderly people.

3.4 Ubiquitous and Cloud Robots

The term ubiquitous robotics is derived from ubiquitous computing. Basic concepts of
ubiquitous robots include networking of every robot, seamless and intuitive operation
of user interfaces, robot accessibility at any time and any place and the provision of
context-based services, i.e. services which are determined by the particular context.
Cloud robots use a cloud computing infrastructure for fast processing of data, par-
ticularly data-intensive tasks such as image processing and voice recognition. This has
the advantages of reducing the memory and processing requirements of the onboard
processor or other computing devices, since the robot uses the processing power of the
cloud computing infrastructure. For conventional robots, every task, such as moving a
foot, grasping an object or recognising a face, requires a signifi cant amount of pro-
cessing and preprogrammed information. Consequently, sophisticated systems such
as humanoid robots need powerful computers and large batteries on board to power
them. Using the cloud has the advantages of both reducing the need for a powerful
computer and large battery on board and improving the robot's capabilities in areas
such as speech recognition, language translation, path planning and 3D mapping.
However, the use of a cloud raises ethical issues relating to privacy and data
security with the possibility of unauthorised users having access to data and data
processing which does not take account of users' privacy requirements. In addition,
users frequently lack knowledge of the issues and are therefore not in a position to
make appropriate trade-offs between privacy and other issues. Designers of cloud
robots therefore have an ethical requirement to both make users aware of the privacy
threats and to design adaptive privacy management systems into the cloud robot to
counter them. In addition, cloud options can sometimes be very slow or even
unavailable. A back-up option could ensure robot functionality when the cloud is
not available but would negate the advantages of using a cloud. Therefore, there is
a need for research to improve cloud reliability and speed, as well as on adaptive
privacy management.
Current research topics in this fi eld include the following:

1. Development of a very large database where robots can store and retrieve infor-
mation about objects, environments and different tasks.
2. Development of a cloud computing infrastructure for generating 3D maps of the
robot environment, as this is much faster than using an onboard computer.
3. A software platform for the control of robots by smartphones or repositories for
frequently manipulated objects by robots to simplify gripping tasks.