Resumen de Towards a legal and ethical framework for personal care robots: anlysis of person carrier, physical assistant and mobile servant robots / per Eduard Fosch Villaronga ; director: Dr. Antoni Roig Batalla ; co-director: Dr. Jordi Albiol Canals.
Eduard Fosch Villaronga
Roboticists building robots that interact with humans may be clueless about what regulations apply to their product. They might not even know whether they are legally responsible for their products. Sometimes, even law is not prepared to promptly accommodate new types of technology, e.g. driverless cars. Therefore, when a new robot is created or a new function/use is introduced, an assessment of the impacts should be carried out.
This assessment should be made first against regulations to make sure that this new technology or its new use remains within the existing liberty space. If the creators of the robot do not encounter any limitations, they can then proceed with its development. On the contrary, if there are some limitations, robot creators will either (1) adjust the robot to comply with the existing regulatory framework; (2) start a negotiation with the regulators to change the law, so that the original robot is compliant with a new regulation; or (3) carry out the original plan and risk to be non- compliant.
The regulator can discuss existing (or lacking) regulations with robot developers and give a legal response accordingly. In an ideal world, robots are clear of impacts and therefore threats can be responded in terms of prevention and opportunities in form of facilitation. In reality, the impacts of robots are often uncertain and less clear, especially when they are inserted in care applications. Therefore, regulators will have to address uncertain risks, ambiguous impacts and yet unknown effects.
Technology is rapidly developing, and regulators and robot creators inevitably have to come to terms with new and unexpected scenarios. A thorough analysis of this new and continuously evolving reality could be useful to better understand the current situation and pave the way to the future creation of a legal and ethical framework that takes into proper account all these new technologies. This is clearly a wide and complex goal, considering the variety of new technologies available today and those under development. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the evaluation of the impacts of personal care robots. In particular, it analyzes how roboticists adjust their creations to the existing regulatory framework for legal compliance purposes.
By carrying out the impact assessment analysis, existing regulatory gaps and lack of regulatory clarity can be highlighted. These gaps should of course be considered further on by lawmakers for a future legal framework for personal care robot.
