ICRA Roboethics Challenge 2023: Intelligent Disobedience in an Elderly Care Home
This work addresses ethical decision-making for robots in elderly care, but it is incremental as it builds on an existing framework without presenting new experimental results or concrete performance metrics.
The paper tackles the challenge of enabling service robots to make ethical decisions in elderly care homes by applying the Intelligent Disobedience framework, resulting in a formal definition and implementation requirements for such robots in this specific scenario.
With the projected surge in the elderly population, service robots offer a promising avenue to enhance their well-being in elderly care homes. Such robots will encounter complex scenarios which will require them to perform decisions with ethical consequences. In this report, we propose to leverage the Intelligent Disobedience framework in order to give the robot the ability to perform a deliberation process over decisions with potential ethical implications. We list the issues that this framework can assist with, define it formally in the context of the specific elderly care home scenario, and delineate the requirements for implementing an intelligently disobeying robot. We conclude this report with some critical analysis and suggestions for future work.