Computer science and philosophy will go hand in hand if attempts made at the University of Hartford and the University of Connecticut of creating an ethical robot come true.
The research is broken up into three projects that are focused on medical ethics.
The main project is getting the robot to remind patients when it is time to take their medicines and to do so in an ethical manner.
Susan Anderson, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut, and her husband, Michael Anderson, a computer scientist at the University of Hartford, have programmed this robot that will have the ability to make an ethical choice. For their experiment, the Andersons used a small humanoid robot from Paris-based Aldebaran Robotics. Aldebaran, whose robot, Nao, walks on tabletops and can grasp objects, such as pill bottles, opened an office in Cambridge this month.
Faced with a patient who refuses to take his medication, the robot can balance the risks of missing a dose with its respect for the patient’s autonomy. If the risk of what doctors and pharmaceutical companies call noncompliance is low (for example if the drug is a painkiller), the robot with a fistful of pills will back off.
But if the unable to sustain without the medication, the robot might insist that you take them, or report your resistance to a human overseer.
Another project focuses on’ Nao’ recognizing sounds, like a patient crying out for help.
"For example, Nao would think, 'Was that a good sound? Was that a bad sound? Do I need to take action?," said Timothy Becker, one of the students involved in the research.
Additionally, researchers from the Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention are, at UConn to study whether the robot holds the potential to help children with autism improve both their motor and their social communication skills.
Teaching robots to be kind to humans might lead to universal ethical standards for both machines and humans, Susan Anderson suggested.
“People tend to rationalize ethical principals to maximize their own self-interest,’’ Anderson said. “By pursuing machine ethics, we have an opportunity to think about how we’d like a robot to treat us.