Fair navigation planning: a humanitarian robot use case
It addresses fairness problems in autonomous systems for humanitarian applications, but is incremental as it builds on existing ethical discussions without presenting new empirical results.
The paper investigates fairness issues in mobile robot navigation, focusing on humanitarian mapping and disaster response, and discusses design choices, trade-offs, and ethical considerations to develop a fair system.
In this paper we investigate potential issues of fairness related to the motion of mobile robots. We focus on the particular use case of humanitarian mapping and disaster response. We start by showing that there is a fairness dimension to robot navigation, and use a walkthrough example to bring out design choices and issues that arise during the development of a fair system. We discuss indirect discrimination, fairness-efficiency trade-offs, the existence of counter-productive fairness definitions, privacy and other issues. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the potential of our methodology as a concrete responsible innovation tool for eliciting ethical issues in the design of autonomous systems.