João Silva Sequeira – författare

This book highlights some of the most pressing safety, ethical, legal and societal issues related to the diverse contexts in which robotic technologies apply.  Focusing on the essential concept of well-being,  it addresses topics that are fundamental not only for research, but also for industry and end-users, discussing the challenges in a wide variety of applications, including domestic robots, autonomous manufacturing, personal care robots and drones.

The work is a collection of contributions resulting from R&D efforts originated from scientific projects involving academia, technological partners, and end-user institutions. The aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of robotics technology applied to Healthcare, and discuss the anticipation of upcoming challenges.

The intersection of Robotics and Medicine includes socially and economically relevant areas, such as rehabilitation, therapy, and healthcare. Innovative usages of current robotics technologies are being somewhat stranded by concerns related to social dynamics. The examples covered in this volume show some of the potential societal benefits robotics can bring and how the robots are being integrated in social environments.

Despite the aforementioned concerns, a fantastic range of possibilities is being opened. The current trend in social robotics adds to technology challenges and requires R&D to think about Robotics as an horizontal discipline, intersectingsocial and exact sciences. For example, robots that can act as if they have credible personalities (not necessarily similar to humans) living in social scenarios, eventually helping people. Also, robots can move inside the human body to retrieve information that otherwise is difficult to obtain. The decision autonomy of these robots raises a broad range of subjects though the immediate advantages of its use are evident.

The book presents examples of robotics technologies tested in healthcare environments or realistically close to being deployed in the field and discusses the challenges involved. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of Healthcare robotics and points to realistically expectable developments in the near future. Chapter 2 describes the challenges deploying a social robot in the Pediatrics ward of an Oncological hospital for simple edutainment activities. Chapter 3 focuses on Human-Robot Interaction techniques and their role in social robotics. Chapter 4 focuson R&D efforts behind an endoscopic capsule robot. Chapter 5 addresses experiments in rehabilitation with orthotics and walker robots. These examples have deep social and economic relations with the Healthcare field, and, at the same time, are representative of the R&D efforts the robotics community is developing.

This book contains the Proceedings of the International Conference on Robot Ethics, held in Lisbon on October 23 and 24, 2015. The conference provided a multidisciplinary forum for discussing central and evolving issues concerning safety and ethics that have arisen in various contexts where robotic technologies are being applied. The papers are intended to promote the formulation of more precise safety standards and ethical frameworks for the rapidly changing field of robotic applications. The conference was held at Pavilhão do Conhecimento/Ciência Viva in Lisbon and brought together leading researchers and industry representatives, promoting a dialogue that combines different perspectives and experiences to arrive at viable solutions for ethical problems in the context of robotics. 

The conference topics included but were not limited to emerging ethical, safety, legal and societal problems in the following domains:

• Service/Social Robots: Robots performing tasks in human environments and involving close human-robot interactions in everyday households; robots for education and entertainment; and robots employed in elderly and other care applications

• Mobile Robots: Self-driving vehicles, autonomous aircraft, trains, cars and drones

• Robots used in medicine and for therapeutic purposes

• Robots used in surveillance and military functions