Volume 11, Issue 1

Human-robot interaction research could benefit from knowing how various parameters of robotic eye movement control affect specific cognitive mechanisms of the user, such as attention or perception. In the present study, we systematically teased apart control parameters of Trajectory Time of robot eye movements (rTT) between two joint positions and Fixation Duration (rFD) on each of these positions of the iCub robot. We showed recordings of these behaviors to participants and asked them to rate each video on how human-like the robot’s behavior appeared. Additionally, we recorded participants’ eye movements to examine whether the different control parameters evoked different effects on cognition and attention. We found that slow but variable robot eye movements yielded relatively higher human-likeness ratings. On the other hand, the eye-tracking data suggest that the human range of rTT is most engaging and evoked spontaneous involvement in joint attention. The pattern observed in subjective ratings was paralleled only by one measure in the implicit objective metrics, namely the frequency of spontaneous attentional following. These findings provide significant clues for controller design to improve the interaction between humans and artificial agents.

Robots are now starting to be developed and used as receptionists in health applications. In this regard, it is important that robots’ behavioural skills are developed and researched so that people have appropriate and comfortable interactions. Smiling and use of first name are two more important social communication skills used during human interactions. While smiling and use of first name are often employed by robots in human interactions, the effect of these behaviours on perceptions of receptionist robots has not yet been experimentally investigated. This study explored the effects of robot smiling and robot use of the participant’s first name on perceptions of robot friendliness, mind, and personality, as well as attitudes and smiling behaviour. Forty participants interacted with a medical receptionist robot four times, in a two by two repeated measures design. Both smiling and use of first name had significant positive effects on participants’ perceptions of robot personality. Robot smiling also showed significant effects on participants’ overall attitudes towards robots, ratings of robot friendliness, and perceptions of the robot’s mind, and increased the frequency of participants’ own smiling. There were no significant interaction effects. Robot smiling in particular can enhance user perceptions of robots and increase reciprocal smiling.

This paper presents a proof of concept prototype study for domestic home robot companions, using a narrative-based methodology based on the principles of immersive engagement and fictional enquiry, creating scenarios which are inter-connected through a coherent narrative arc, to encourage participant immersion within a realistic setting. The aim was to ground human interactions with this technology in a coherent, meaningful experience. Nine participants interacted with a robotic agent in a smart home environment twice a week over a month, with each interaction framed within a greater narrative arc. Participant responses, both to the scenarios and the robotic agents used within them are discussed, suggesting that the prototyping methodology was successful in conveying a meaningful interaction experience.

Feedback design is an important aspect in person-following robots for older adults. This paper presents a user-centered design approach to ensure the design is focused on users’ needs and preferences. A sequence of user studies with a total of 35 older adults (aged 62 years and older) was conducted to explore their preferences regarding feedback parameters for a socially assistive person-following robot. The preferred level of robot transparency and the desired content for the feedback was first explored. This was followed by an assessment of the preferred mode and timing of feedback. The chosen feedback parameters were then implemented and evaluated in a final experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the design. Results revealed that older adults preferred to receive only basic status information. They preferred voice feedback over tone, and at a continuous rate to keep them constantly aware of the state and actions of the robot. The outcome of the study is a further step towards feedback design guidelines that could improve interaction quality in person-following robots for older adults.

This work addresses the issue of ocean monitoring and clean-up of polluted zones, as well as the notion of trajectory planning and fault tolerance for semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles. A hybrid approach for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is introduced to monitor the ocean region and cooperate with swarm of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to clean dirty zones. The paper proposes two solutions that apply to trajectory planning from the base of life to the dirty zone for swarm USVs. The first solution is performed by a modified Genetic Algorithm (GA), and the second uses a modified Ant Algorithm (AA). The proposed solutions were both implemented in the simulation with different scenarios for the dirty zone. This approach detects and reduces the pollution level in ocean zones while taking into account the problem of fault tolerance related to unmanned cleaning vehicles.

It is not uncommon for humans to exhibit abusive behaviour towards robots. This study compares how abusive behaviour towards a human is perceived differently in comparison with identical behaviour towards a robot. We showed participants 16 video clips of unparalleled quality that depicted different levels of violence and abuse. For each video, we asked participants to rate the moral acceptability of the action, the violence depicted, the intention to harm, and how abusive the action was. The results indicate no significant difference in the perceived morality of the actions shown in the videos across the two victim agents. When the agents started to fight back, their reactive aggressive behaviour was rated differently. Humans fighting back were seen as less immoral compared with robots fighting back. A mediation analysis showed that this was predominately due to participants perceiving the robot’s response as more abusive than the human’s response.

This article describes a long-term study evaluating the use of the humanoid robot Kaspar in a specialist nursery for children with autism. The robot was used as a tool in the hands of teachers or volunteers, in the absence of the research team on-site. On average each child spent 16.53 months in the study. Staff and volunteers at the nursery were trained in using Kaspar and were using it in their day-to-day activities in the nursery. Our study combines an “in the wild” approach with a rigorous approach of collecting and including users’ feedback during an iterative evaluation and design cycle of the robot. This article focuses on the design of the study and the results from several interviews with the robot’s users. We also show results from the children’s developmental assessments by the teachers prior to and after the study. Results suggest a marked beneficial effect for the children from interacting with Kaspar. We highlight the challenges of transferring experimental technologies like Kaspar from a research setting into everyday practice in general and making it part of the day-to-day running of a nursery school in particular. Feedback from users led subsequently to many changes being made to Kaspar’s hardware and software. This type of invaluable feedback can only be gained in such long-term field studies.

Part of the ethical debate about sex with robots concerns whether sex with a robot is rape of that robot. It therefore makes sense for us to debate what should be the boundaries of consent, decades from now, i.e. consent given by humans to robots. How will the sexbot landscape look in situations when it is the human who is consenting, or not, to a sexual invitation or advance by the robot? The sexbot will have responsibilities towards its human partner, and there will be moral and legal consequences if it fails to deliver on those responsibilities. An unresolved ethical argument employed by many of those who deplore the coming advent of sex robots is that robots are unable to proffer a meaningful indication of sexual consent, and therefore a human deciding to have sex with a robot is committing rape of the robot. A parallel question, as yet to be addressed, is under what circumstances should a robot be considered to be acting in a sexually inappropriate or illegal manner towards a human? And this question embraces some others, including: “How can a robot determine, with any degree of certainty, whether or not a proximate human wants or at least consents to sex?”; “What behaviours by a robot are permissible within the #MeToo context when the robot is exploring a proximate human’s current level of sexual interest in the robot?”; and “If a robot oversteps the accepted bounds of sexual behaviour with a human, who is responsible and what should be the legal consequences?” We discuss these issues and speculate on how the sex robots of the future will be able to conform to the ethics of consent.

The creation and deployment of sex robots are accelerating. Sex robots are service robots that perform actions contributing directly towards improvement in the satisfaction of the sexual needs of a user. In this paper, we explore the potential use of these robots for elder and disabled care purposes,which is currently underexplored. Indeed, although every human should be able to enjoy physical touch, intimacy, and sexual pleasure, persons with disabilities are often not in the position to fully experience the joys of life in the same manner as abled people. Similarly, older adults may have sexual needs that public healthcare tend to ignore as an essential part of their well-being. We develop a conceptual analysis of how sex robots could empower persons with disabilities and older adults to exercise their sexual rights, which are too often disregarded in society. Our contribution seeks to understand whether sex robots could serve as a step forward in enhancing the care of (mainly but not exclusively) persons with disabilities and older adults. By identifying the potential need to incorporate sex within the concept of care, and by exploring the use of robot technology to ease its materialization, we hope to inform the policy debate around the regulation of robots and set the scene for further research.

This essay examines the debate over the status of sociable robots and relational artifacts through the prism of our relationship to television. In their work on human-technology relations, Cynthia Breazeal and Sherry Turkle have staked out starkly different assessments. Breazeal’s work on sociable robots suggests that these technological artifacts will be human helpmates and sociable companions. Sherry Turkle argues that such relational artifacts seduce us into simulated relationships with technological others that largely serve to exploit our emotional vulnerabilities and undermine authentic human relationships. Drawing on an analysis of the television as our first relational artifact and on the AMC television show Humans , this essay argues that in order to intervene in this debate we need a multimediated theory of technology that situates our technical artifacts in the domestic realm and examines their impact on those populations especially impacted by such technologies, including women, children, and the elderly. It is only then that we will be able to take the full measure of the impact of such sociable technologies on our being human.

Is it possible for human beings to establish romantic relationships with robots? What kind of otherness, or alterity, will be construed in the process of falling in love with a robot? Can a robotic companion mean more than being a tool for house-work, a caretaker, an aid of self-gratification, or a sex-doll? Phenomenological analysis of love experience suggests that romantic feelings necessarily include experiencing the alterity of the partner as an affective subjectivity that freely, willingly, and passionately commits to its partner. The romantic commitment is expected to stem from the sentient inner selves of the lovers, which is one of the features that robots are lacking. Thus the artificial alterity might disengage our romantic aspirations, and, as argued by many, will make them morally inferior to intraspecies love affairs. The current analysis will restrain from ethical considerations, however, and will focus on whether robots can in principle elicit human feelings of love.

This paper aims to analyze the effects of the introduction of teledildos on our sexual lives according to postphenomenology and mediation theory. Digital technologies are getting very intimate by mediating even our sexual intercourse, as in the case of teledildonics. According to postphenomenology and mediation theory, technologies are never neutral, but they change how we live and how we relate to the world around us. Thus, we need to ask how these intimate technologies are going to affect us in the way we live our intimacy and relationships. This paper will show how teledildonics will allow human beings to have sexual intercourse with every object around by turning them into sexually interactive "quasi-others", and how this change will affect the way we give meanings and values to love and sex in general. The first part of this paper will show the introduction of teledildonics will affect how we perceive the world around us and how we are tempted by it. The second part will highlight how even the meanings and values we give to sex and love will be shaped according to the new potentialities provided by teledildos.

In this article, we present TouchYou, a pair of wearable interfaces that enable affective touch interactions with people at long-distance. Through a touch-sensitive interface, which works by touch, pressure and capacitance, the body becomes the own input for stimulating the other body, which has a stimulation interface that enables the feeling of being touched. The person receives an electrical muscle stimulation, thermal and mechanical stimulation that react depending on the touch sensed by the first interface. By using the TouchYou, people can stimulate each other, using their own body, not only for sexual relations at a distance but for the production of affection and another way of feeling. We discuss the importance of the touch for human relationships, the current state of the art in haptic interfaces and how the technology can be used for the affection remote transmission. We present the design process of the TouchYou sensitive and stimulation interfaces, with a contribution of a method for developing custom touch sensors, we explore usage scenarios for the technology, including sex toys and sex robots and we present the concept of using the body as a remote sex interface.

Sex robots may be surfacing in recent controversy, but they are certainly not a novelty in the academic debate. However, given the lack of legal reasoning in this field of research, this article aims at examining the balancing of the fundamental rights involved in the sex robots’ manufacture and usage, taking Asimov’s first law as the main starting point and with an eye to a future lawmaking process. Specifically, Section 1 gives a brief overview on how to define sex robots, while distinguishing them from sex toys and pornography. Section 2 interprets Asimov’s first law in order to apply it to sex robots. Section 3 develops a pertaining legal reasoning based on competing fundamental rights, i.e. the user’s sexual freedom and the manufacturer’s freedom of enterprise versus the gender dignity and right to equality. Finally, the conclusions review the main findings and address considerations to policymakers.

In this paper, I will try to examine the main objections and moral qualms by some opponents to sexbots. While minor points of their argumentation are not entirely groundless, my aim is to show that overall, most of the claims directed against sexbots are: (1) rarely based on facts or data; (2) driven by unfounded fears; and originate from; (3) implicit to very strong political and ideological beliefs. The driving moral forces behind the opponents’ position are not traditional moral categories such as good or bad per se, but they are rather subsumed or dissolved under very vague and fashionable concepts such as gender and objectification . Hence, morality in this case can be seen as highly subservient to a political cause: it views some aspects of technological progress as an offshoot of all-mighty capitalism; and sexbots in particular, as a threat to social order, that will redefine or even wipe out traditional interactions between human beings and ultimately, destroy humanity. I will argue on the contrary that there is a strong moral case for sexbots, that stems from notions such as sexual liberty , personal freedom and humanism , and extends to novel concepts, like sexual equality or sexual opportunity , sexual justice and compassion. Moreover, I am fairly convinced that sexbots, widely available and used in a responsible manner, might have a positive impact on society as a whole. The sexual well-being and fulfilment of individuals in want of intimacy and emotional connection, could be seen as a tool for social progress and sexual justice. As Socrates brilliantly pointed out through Plato, most of human misery, suffering and wars, arise from our unfulfilled bodily desires and frustrations (“Phaedo”, 66c). He of course advocated in favour of chastity and resisting sexual temptation, but his basic premise and insight are still valid today. Finally, the underlying questions I will explore in the following pages are: how come such vast swaths of the progressive camp, adopt a conservative discourse, when it comes to sexual progress ? Why is there such a staunch opposition to sexbots and the ensuing right to pleasure , while at the same time, we are precisely witnessing in the most recent decades, an inflation in all kinds of subjective rights, that we tend to value so much?

In this article, we present our experiences from research into the healthy ageing and well-being of older people and we report on our personal opinions of robots that may help the elderly to have sex and to cope with isolation and loneliness. However, and while there is a growing industry for sex robots and other sex toys and gadgets, there is also a growing concern about the ethics of such an industry. As is the case with pornography, the concept of sex robots may be criticized, yet it has deep roots in human civilization, with erotic depictions that date back to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Ages. So the need for an artefact that would offer sexually relevant functionality is not new at all. But what might be new and worrying is the potential for using artificial intelligence in sex robots in ways that might cause a repositioning of our entire value system. Such a threat is not related to the proliferation of sex robots per se but to the use of robots in general and in a variety of other fields of application.

The idea of sex with robots seems to fascinate the general public, raising both enthusiasm and revulsion. We ran two experimental studies ( N s = 172 and 260) where we compared people’s reactions to variants of stories about a person visiting a bordello. Our results show that paying for the services of a sex robot is condemned less harshly than paying for the services of a human sex worker, especially if the payer is married. We have for the first time experimentally confirmed that people are somewhat unsure about whether using a sex robot while in a committed monogamous relationship should be considered as infidelity. We also shed light on the psychological factors influencing attitudes toward sex robots, including disgust sensitivity and interest in science fiction. Our results indicate that sex with a robot is indeed genuinely considered as sex, and a sex robot is genuinely seen as a robot; thus, we show that standard research methods on sexuality and robotics are also applicable in research on sex robotics.

Music is the best medium for expressing emotions and arousal nonverbally. PLAY ME is a gender-neutral Arduino-based system that allows partners in a long-distance relationship to perceive each other’s sexual arousal and to provide stimulation of erogenous zones using music. PLAY ME’s main parts are a tiny pneumatic anal probe connected to a pressure sensor and a bodysuit with integrated vibrators. Whenever both partners wear these devices, a real-time exchange of emotions and corporeal feelings can be enabled. Three sensors capture genital sexual arousal and transform it into music: a pulse sensor, a sensor for galvanic skin response and a pneumatic anal pressure probe. The anal probe measures pelvic tensions and contractions. Its signal controls the main voice. Higher arousal leads to stronger pelvic muscle tensions. Measured data are mapped to pitch, so the level of sexual arousal is audible in a comprehensive way, and orgasms can be clearly identified by regular pulsating sounds. The pulse sensor and the skin response sensor are the driving rhythm and drone frequency. The vibrators in the bodysuit are controlled by sound that is generated by the partner using any audio source. Mixing the sounds generated by the sensors and the instrument leads to interactive music that can enhance erotic feelings and sexual arousal in the way of biofeedback. This article describes the background and construction of the PLAY ME system and shows diagrams of sensor values recorded during sexual stimulation. After a discussion of the results, there is an outlook toward further development.

This article offers a novel reading of the criticisms of sex robots put forward by the Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR). Focusing on the implication of a loss of empathy, it structures CASR’s worries as an argument from moral degradation centered around the potential effects on sexbot users’ sexual and moral subjectivity. This argument is subsequently explored through the combined lenses of postphenomenology and the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas. In so doing, it describes the type of human-technology relations that sexbots invite, identifying alterity as a central feature. It also highlights how alterity, responsibility, and subjectivity are intimately connected. However, that connection is distinctly different in sexual circumstances, making current versions of Levinasian roboethics largely inapplicable for the ethics of sexbots. To overcome this, the article delves into Levinas’ phenomenology of Eros and identifies voluptuousness as a type of enjoyment of the Other that is different from the enjoyment invited by current sexbots and is compatible with responsibility. Based on this, the article provides examples of how this phenomenology of Eros can inspire the design of future sexbots in ways that alleviate some of CASR’s concerns.

After more than four decades of school sex education programs, there is still a great deal of inadequate information around, together with mixed messages and general confusion. Topics covered have ranged from “no sex” to “safe sex”, and there has been a tendency for pupils to drift into the “alternative” areas of pornographic media. This approach may have contributed to generations of women and men finding themselves, in adult life, living with unresolved sexual problems caused by a truncated and disorderly “education”. The arrival of robots presents an opportunity to reconsider the way in which sexuality is taught and to introduce an innovative and ethical educational practice. This article proposes a conceptual framework where there can be an extension of medical simulation toward sex education based on advanced sex robots, offering a dynamic, effective and ethical teaching method. This article considers why, how and where as well as what is workable and technically feasible. The target is that, with the help of a new generation of robots, a fulfilling love life will be accessible to every man and woman. The engagement of both, the simulation community itself and the political will, is vital to ensure that a more enlightened and emotionally intelligent sex education can become a reality in the near future.

In this article, the author provides a new view on intimate relationships with “virtual humans” such as robots and AIs. Recent technological developments have enabled firms to create humanlike robots and AIs. It is likely that, in the near future, a growing number of people will want intimate relationships with these virtual humans. This may receive harsh criticism, for example, that such a move would indicate objectification of women or ethical wrongdoing. Instead, however, it should be viewed in light of quality of life (QOL) for sexual minorities and people with various difficulties. Aided by the discussion of the introduction of the Long Term Public Care Insurance (LTCI) system in Japan in the late 1990s, the author positions this trend as the “socialification” of familyship  –  that is, a phenomenon in which the virtual humans, as products or services offered by businesses, become partners/family members, and a change by which some parts of the intimate relationships within families are shared in society. Just as the LTCI system, which was introduced as a socialification of nursing care, reduced the burden of care on Japanese women and improved their QOL, adoption of virtual humans as a socialification of familyship is also likely to improve the QOL of people with difficulties worldwide.

This research explores multisensory sexual arousal in men and women, and how it can be implemented and shared between multiple individuals in Virtual Reality (VR). This is achieved through the stimulation of human senses with immersive technology including visual, olfactory, auditory, and haptic triggers. Participants are invited to VR to test various sensory triggers and assess them as sexually arousing or not. A literature review on VR experiments related to sexuality, the concepts of perception and multisensory experiments, and data collected from self-reports was used to conclude. The goal of this research is to establish that sexual arousal is a multisensory event that may or may not be linked to the presence or thought of the intended object of desire (sexual partner). By examining what stimulates arousal, we better understand the multisensory capacity of humans, leading not only to richer sexual experiences but also to the further development of wearable sextech products, soft robotics, and multisensory learning machines. This understanding helps with other research related to human-robot interaction, affection, detection, and transmission in both physical and virtual realities, and how VR technology can help to design a new generation of sex robots.

The use of sex robots is expected to become widespread in the coming decades, not only for hedonistic purposes but also for therapy, to keep the elderly company in care homes, for education, and to help couples in long-distance relationships. As new technological artifacts are introduced to society, they play a role in shaping the societal norms and belief systems while also creating tensions between various approaches and relationships, resulting in a range of policy-making proposals that bring into question traditional disciplinary boundaries that exist between the technical and the social. The Narrative Policy Framework attempts to position policy studies in such a way so as to better describe, explain, and predict a wide variety of processes and outcomes in a political world increasingly burdened by uncertain reporting, capitalistic marketing, and persuasive narratives. Through content analysis, this study identifies coalitions in the scientific community, based on results gathered from Scopus, to develop insights into the manner in which liberal, utilitarian, and conservative influences alike are shaping narrative elements and content both in favor of and against sex robot technology.

In early 2015, Kathleen Richardson announced the arrival of the world’s largest, organised resistance group against the production of sex robots in society: The Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR). Since the birth of the CASR, Richardson and other feminists have manipulated a combination of radical feminist rhetoric and sex industry abolitionist narratives, in order to promote the criminalisation of sex robots. Moreover, the CASR and Richardson have also made some rather unique claims regarding the “similarities” between sex workers and sex robots, which have not previously surfaced within the narratives of radical feminists in recent years. This article seeks to analyse if their analogous reference to sex workers and sex robots has credibility and viability in the context of the digitalised sex industry and in the wider teledildonic and sex robot market. Furthermore, this article will also formulate solutions for the ethical and social contentions surrounding the merge of sex dolls and robots within the contemporary sex industry. In order to disentangle the radical feminist arguments surrounding sex robots and the sex industry, the following contentions will be addressed: Is moral objection to female sex robots using client-sex worker analogies from feminists justified? Is opposition to sex robots based on informed opinion about the digitalised sex industry? To what extent are the positive considerations around sex robots/dolls and sex-technology ignored in the narratives of radical feminists and the CASR? What practical applications recommendations can be made to the sex robot industry from the stipulations of the CASR and the current state of sex dolls/robots in the sex industry?

Human-AGI relations are soon going to be a subject to number of policies and regulations. Although most current Blue Sky de lege ferenda postulates towards robot and artificial intelligence regulatory framework are focused on the liability of the producer or the owner of the AI based product, one might try to conceptualize the legal relations and rules for the coexistence between humans and an anthropocognitive AI’s (AGI) possessing proper capacity. The main purpose of this article is to explore the possibility of applying the principles of Metalaw to mentioned relations. The scope shall consider a non-chattel and non-property based status of those types of AIs, as well as sufficient advancement of such entities, or the emergence of advanced non-human based intelligence.

In this article, we examine the state-of-the-art and current applications of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically for human resources (HR). We study whether, due to the experimental state of the algorithms used and the nature of training and test samples, a further control and auditing in the research community is necessary to guarantee fair and accurate results. In particular, we identify the positive and negative consequences of the usage of video-interview analysis via AI in recruiting processes as well as the main machine learning techniques used and their degrees of efficiency. We focus on some controversial characteristics that could lead to ethical and legal consequences for candidates, companies and states regarding discrimination in the job market (e.g. gender and race). There is a lack of regulation and a need for external and neutral auditing for the type of analyses done in interviews. We present a multi-agent architecture that aims at total legal compliance and more effective HR processes management.

In this article, we investigate the relation between gender and exoskeleton development through the lens of intersectionality theory. Exoskeleton users come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and genders. However, it is often the case that wearable robot engineers do not develop such devices primarily on the premise that the product should fit as many end users as possible. Instead, designers tend to use the one-size-fits-all approach – a design choice that seems legitimate from the return of an investment viewpoint but that may not do as much justice to end users. Intended users of exoskeletons have a series of user criteria, including height, weight, and health condition, in the case of rehabilitation. By having rigid inclusion criteria for whom the intended user of the technology can be, the exclusion criteria will grow in parallel. The implications and deep-rootedness of gender and diversity considerations in practices and structural systems have been largely disregarded. Mechanical and robot technology were historically seen as part of a distinct male sphere, and the criteria used today to develop new technology may reflect the biases that existed in another time that should no longer be valid. To make this technology available for all, we suggest some tools to designers and manufacturers to help them think beyond their target market and be more inclusive.

Pediatric access to exoskeletons lags far behind that of adults. In this article, we promote inclusiveness in exoskeleton robotics by identifying and addressing challenges and barriers to pediatric access to this potentially life-changing technology. We first present available exoskeleton solutions for upper and lower limbs and note the variability in the absence of these. Next, we query the possible reasons for this variability in access, explicitly focusing on children, who constitute a categorically vulnerable population, and also stand to benefit significantly from the use of this technology at this critical point in their physical and emotional growth. We propose the use of a life-based design approach as a way to address some of the design challenges and offer insights toward a resolution regarding market viability and implementation challenges. We conclude that the development of pediatric exoskeletons that allow for and ensure access to health-enhancing technology is a crucial aspect of the responsible provision of health care to all members of society. For children, the stakes are particularly high, given that this technology, when used at a critical phase of a child’s development, not only holds out the possibility of improving the quality of life but also can improve the long-term health prospects.

This contribution aims to open the discussion on how to balance the opportunities and the risks posed by the increased robotization of the economy. It particularly addresses the concerns related to the sustainability of the current Social Security systems. Having in mind the quick process of skill depreciation, it is urgent to incentivize workers’ training and human employment. Some ways already used in the past to finance similar goals are reviewed here in order to show possible solutions to be adapted in the near future within the European Union in line with the guidelines given by several international institutions.

This article aims to focus attention on the threat to domestic law and order posed by the misuse of wearable robotic exoskeletons and exosuits intended for beneficial uses such as rehabilitative care and industrial production. Threats to domestic law and order from the misuse of exoskeletons by rogue users range from creating havoc in public spaces, violent crime and endangerment of civilian(s) to enhanced burglary techniques. Drawing on existing legal-institutional frameworks and law enforcement apparatus, this article conceptualises a general framework for the responsible end use of exoskeletons and exosuits. It calls for proactive inward-looking state strategies to manage the bads of exoskeleton and exosuit acquisition, possession and trade while encouraging good uses. Importantly, this article does not suggest that the legal-institutional mechanisms discussed for managing misuse are the only ones relevant to the issue except as a guide for encouraging further discussion in the area.

Recently, several research projects in the Netherlands have focused on the development of wearable robotic exoskeletons (WREs) for individuals with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Such research on WREs is often treated solely within the disciplines of biomedical and mechanical engineering, overlooking insights from disability studies and philosophy of technology. We argue that mainly two such insights should receive attention: the problematization of the ableism connected to the individual model of disability and the stigmatization by assistive technology. While disability studies have largely rejected the individual model of disability, the engineering sciences seem to still locate disability in an individual’s body, not questioning their own problematization of disability. Additionally, philosophy of technology has argued that technologies are not neutral instruments but shape users’ actions and perceptions. The design of WREs may convey a message about the understanding of disability, which can be comprehended as a challenge and an opportunity: stigmatization needs to be avoided and positive views on disability can be evoked. This article aims to highlight the benefits of considering these socio-philosophical perspectives by examining the case of WREs for people with DMD and proposing design principles for WREs. These principles may enhance acceptability of WREs, not only by individuals with DMD but also by other users, and help engineers to better place their work in the social context.

Wearable robots are devices intended to improve the quality of users’ life by augmenting, assisting, or substituting human functions. Exoskeletons are one of the most widespread types of wearable robots, currently used extensively in medical applications (and also for industrial, assistive, or military purposes), thus governed by regulations for medical devices and their conformity assessment. On top of that, manufacturers must also specify if their exoskeletons can be categorized as machines and, therefore, additionally apply a number of requirements mandated from machinery regulations. This work focuses on capturing both the abovementioned requirements enacted by the Medical Devices Directive 2017/745 and the Machinery Directive 2006/42 into a single framework. It formalizes into Rules the Conformity Assessment procedures regarding the marketability of exoskeletons indicated by the CE marking (“Conformité Européene”). These Rules, expressed in the Positional-Slotted Object-Applicative (PSOA) RuleML code, were complemented by representative Facts based on real-life cases of commercialized exoskeletons. Additional Exoskeletons Facts can be included by users from other forms (such as MS Excel) and translated into the PSOA RuleML code through the provided Python script. The open-source Exoskeletons’ CE mark (ExosCE) Rules KB was tested by querying in the open-source PSOATransRun system. The ExosCE Rules prototype can assist in the compliance process of stakeholders and in the registration of exoskeletons with a CE mark.