Applications of Institutional Robotics
The goal of this post is to find better applications for Institutional Robotics. I present some of them and I will be updating the list. Please feel free to comment and increase this list. All your contributions will be credited.
- Defense Regulation: we cannot prevent military use of robots. However, its use might be regulated by neutral and trustworthy organisations as the ONU. For instance, robots are forbidden to kill civilians.
- Civil Regulation: in case robots were used by civilians in common-life tasks, they might be also regulated by each country in order to prevent misuses. For instance, prevent robots to steal, harm, kill, etc. following the orders of its owner.
- Self-Refereeing in RoboCup: adversarial teams of robots are currently being developed to play soccer, but the referees are still humans controlling robots remotely. A global view of the match, namely all sensor data from all robots, might be used to enforce the rules of the game transparently to robot reasoners [1, Future Work, New applications of norms].
Aibo robots playing soccer
An extract of my thesis, section New applications of norms:
[…]In this thesis, following the Electronic Institutions tradition we applied in our examples the regulation of Multi-agent systems (MAS) to e-commerce, mainly to auctions. However, we want to find and exploit new interesting applications of norms in MAS that may lead to enrich the current model. We envisage its application in robot soccer and autonomic networking.
A question in the field of robot soccer that we find interesting is: how robots could autonomously play soccer without a referee? To solve this we envisage a software layer common to robots of any team. This layer would act as a middleware between the hardware layer, that deals with motors, rotors, sensors, etc., and the reasoning layer, that according with the information of the hardware layer generate an individual or team plan that is transformed in commands to the hardware layer in order to play. This middleware would follow the metaphor of institution but distributed in all robots to enforce some global rules. As a literary example, the reader may think of the hard-coding of Asimov’ three laws of robotics in the “brain” of every robot. However, the programming of the reasoning layer would be available of end-users, as human coaches in the case of robot soccer. This topic requires further exploration as, for instance, norms could vary in time possibly as result of the execution of protocols. For instance, soccer rules may change from season to season due to some recurrent unwanted behavior of players.[…]
Institutional Robotics and Norms in Multi-agent systems by Andrés García-Camino is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Spain License.
Based on a work at blog.garcia-camino.es.