Ronald C. Arkin

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• Ph.D.
• Professor Emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology

Intimate relationships between robots and human beings may begin to form in the near future. Market forces, customer demand, and other factors may drive the creation of various forms of robots to which humans may form strong emotional attachments. Yet prior to the technology becoming fully actualized, numerous ethical, legal, and social issues must...

Addresses the concept of deception and truth when dealing with robotics. What if you could no longer believe what your robot assistant was telling you was the truth? Are there circumstances under which that would be acceptable? What if it was for your own good? The time of robotic deception is rapidly approaching. We are being bombarded regarding t...

In this reprint of the original article, which appeared in AISB Quarterly, July 2013, Vol. 137, Ron Arkin, argues that calls to ban militarized automated technologies are premature. Arkin notes that automated technologies may prove to be more humane in war through limiting combatant and non-combatant casualties. In addition, adherence to Internatio...

An under-examined aspect of human–robot interaction that warrants further exploration is whether robots should be permitted to influence a user’s behavior for that person’s own good. Yet an even more controversial practice could be on the horizon, which is allowing a robot to “nudge” a user’s behavior for the good of society. In this article, we ex...

Examines the technology of autonomous systems and explores its ethical and social implications. Artificial intelligence (AI) and its role in autonomous systems have promised everything from utopian freedom to existential dystopia. The unfilled hyperbole surrounding past and present promises regarding AI futures has left many people skeptical, afrai...

Militaries around the world have long been cognizant of the potential benefits associated with autonomous systems both in the conduct of warfare and in its prevention. This has lead to the declaration by some that this technology will lead to a fundamental change in the ways in which war is conducted, i.e., a revolution in military affairs (RMA) no...

Given a large repository of geo-tagged imagery, we seek to automatically find visual elements, for example windows, balconies, and street signs, that are most distinctive for a certain geo-spatial area, for example the city of Paris. This is a tremendously difficult task as the visual features distinguishing architectural elements of different plac...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with an expressive mask are particularly vulnerable to stigmatization during interactions with their caregivers due to their inability to express affect through nonverbal channels. Our approach to uphold PD patient dignity is through the use of an ethical robot that mediates patient shame when it recognizes norm vi...

By increasing the use of autonomous rescue robots in search and rescue (SAR), the chance of interaction between rescue robots and human victims also grows. More specifically, when autonomous rescue robots are considered in SAR, it is important for robots to handle sensitively human victims' emotions. Deception can potentially be used effectively by...

The cognitive process that enables many primate species to efficiently traverse their environment has been a subject of numerous studies. Mental rotation is hypothesized to be one such process. The evolutionary causes for dominance in primates of mental rotation over its counterpart, rotational invariance, is still not conclusively understood. Advi...

Social robots can benefit by adding deceptive capabilities. In particular, robotic deception should benefit the deceived human partners when used in the context of human-robot interaction (HRI). We define this kind of robotic deception as a robot's other-oriented deception and aim to add these capabilities to the robotic systems. Toward that end, w...

Robots are becoming an increasingly pervasive feature of our personal lives. As a result, there is growing importance placed on examining what constitutes appropriate behavior when they interact with human beings. In this paper, we discuss whether companion robots should be permitted to "nudge" their human users in the direction of being "more ethi...

Deception is a common and essential behavior in humans. Since human beings gain many advantages from deceptive capabilities, we can also assume that robotic deception can provide benefits in several ways. Particularly, the use of robotic deception in human-robot interaction contexts is becoming an important and interesting research question. Despit...

Robot navigation already has many relatively efficient solutions: reactive control, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRTs), etc. But many primates possess an additional inherent spatial reasoning capability: mental rotation. Our research addresses the question of what role, if any, mental rotations can p...

Many applications require knowledge about how to deceive, including those related to safety, security, and warfare. Speech and text analysis can help detect deception, as can cameras, microphones, physiological sensors, and intelligent software. Models of deception and noncooperation can make a virtual or mixed-reality training environment more rea...

The articles in this special issue on unmanned flight control address the theory and practice underlying the deployment of unmanned vehicles with a focus on algorithmic issues that arise in coverage and surveillance.

Expounding on the results of the author's work with the US Army Research Office, DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, and various defense industry contractors, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots explores how to produce an "artificial conscience" in a new class of robots, humane-oids, which are robots that can potentially perform more et...

This paper describes experience in developing an interdisciplinary mechatronics laboratory and success in using the lab to support academic instruction. It emphasizes the strategies and procedures that were important in creating an interdisciplinary laboratory in a traditional discipline-oriented academic institution. The strategies address objecti...

Robots in groups or colonies can exhibit an enormous variety and richness of behaviors which cannot be observed with singly autonomous systems. Of course, this is analogous to the amazing variety of group animal behaviors which can be observed in nature. In recent years more and more investigators have started to study these behaviors. The studies...

August 8-12, 1994, Brighton, England From Animals to Animats 3 brings together research intended to advance the front tier of an exciting new approach to understanding intelligence. The contributors represent a broad range of interests from artificial intelligence and robotics to ethology and the neurosciences. Unifying these approaches is the noti...

More than sixty contributions in From Animals to Animats 2 by researchers in ethology, ecology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and related fields investigate behaviors and the underlying mechanisms that allow animals and, potentially, robots to adapt and survive in uncertain environments. Topics covered The Animat Approach to Adapt...

Reactive schema-based navigation is possible in space domains by extending the methods developed for ground-based navigation found within the Autonomous Robot Architecture (AURA). Reformulation of two dimensional motor schemas for three dimen-sional applications is a straightforward process. The manifold advantages of schema-based control persist,...

The Autonomous Robot Architecture (AuRA) incorporates an Uncertainty Management Subsystem that is used to guide perceptual processing. Expectations generated from a spatial uncertainty map provide windows into incoming video images that are used for the recognition and tracking of landmarks. This system takes advantage of a priori world knowledge t...