Robotics research and applications are increasingly raising ethical questions, related to emerging interactions between robots and humans, as well as to the closer interaction between robotics research and the biological and social sciences, for the common purpose of studying humans.

The application of ethics to machines, including robots and computer programs, has been mostly limited so far to the consideration that designers and operators should take full responsibility of machines’ actions. However, in the near future, the robotics community will develop machines whose behavior will be an emergent and, to some extent, unforeseeable result of design and operation decisions made by humans and even by other machines. Moreover, the interaction and the physical integration of human beings and robotics systems is increasing exponentially.

Considering the high level of technological sophistication reached in recent years, the fact that technology in general, and robotics in particular, are moving closer and closer to human beings and human life, Roboethics, the ethical reflection that constantly evaluates and guides the scientific and engineering research, is of primary importance.

In 2005, EURON (European Robotics Research Network) funded the Research Atelier on Roboethics, with the aim of developing the first Roadmap for a Roboethics. The workshop on Roboethics took place in Genoa, Italy, 27th February - 3rd March 2006.

The ultimate purpose of the project was to provide a systematic assessment of the ethically sensitive issues involved in the Robotics R&D; to increase the understanding of the problems at stake, and to promote further study and transdisciplinary research.

The Roboethics Roadmap – which was the result of the Atelier and of the following discussions and editing - outlines the multiple pathways for research and exploration in the field, and indicates how they might be developed. The Roadmap embodies the contributions of more than 50 scientists, scholars and technologists, in many fields of investigations from sciences and humanities. It is also a useful tool in view of cultural, religious and ethical differences.

In the Roadmap, the authors have confined their definition of intelligence to an engineering point of view, that is, the operational intelligence – although they are aware of the fact that roboticists’s terminology regarding robots’ functions is often taken from the language used for human beings.

One of the most ambitious aims of Robotics is to design an autonomous robot that could reach - and even surpass - human intelligence and performance in partially unknown, changing, and unpredictable environments. The Artificial Intelligence shall be able to lead robots to fulfill the missions required by the end-users. To achieve this goal, over the past decades scientists are working on AI techniques in many fields.

One of the fundamental aspects of the robots is their capability to learn: to learn the characteristics of the surrounding environment, that is, a) the physical environment, but also b) the living beings who inhabit it. This means that robots working in a given environment have to recognize human beings and living creatures from inorganic objects.

In addition to perform a learning capability about the environment, robots have to understand their own behavior, through a self reflective process. They have to learn from the experience, replicating somehow the natural processes of the evolution of intelligence in living beings (synthesis procedures, trying-and-error, learning by doing, and so on).

All these processes embodied in the robots produce an intelligent machine endowed with the capability to express a certain degree of autonomy. It follows that a robot can behave, in some cases, in a way which is unpredictable for their human designers. Basically, the increasing autonomy of the robots could give rise to unpredictable and non predictable behaviours. So, without necessarily imagining some Sci-Fi scenarios, in a few years we are going to cohabit with robots endowed with self knowledge and autonomy – in the engineering meaning of these words.

In terms of scope, the authors of the Roadmap have taken into consideration – from the point of view of the ethical issue connected to Robotics – a temporal range of a decade, in whose frame it could reasonably be located and inferred – on the basis of the current state-of-the-Art in Robotics – certain foreseeable developments in the field. For this reason, the authors have considered premature – and have only hinted at – problems inherent in the possible emergence of human functions in the robot: like consciousness, free will, self-consciousness, sense of dignity, emotions, and so on. Consequently, this is why the Roadmap does not examine problems –debated in literature – like the need not to consider robot as our slaves, or the need to guarantee them the same respect, rights and dignity we owe to human workers.

Likewise, and for the same reasons, the target of the Roboethics Roadmap is not the robot and its artificial ethics, but the human ethics of the robots’ designers, manufacturers and users. Although informed about the issues presented in some papers on the need and possibility to attribute moral values to robots’ decisions, and about the chance that in the future robots might be moral entities like – if not more than–   human beings, the authors have chosen, in the first release of the Roboethics Roadmap, to examine the ethical issues of the human beings involved in the design, manufacturing, and use of the robots.

They have felt that problems like those connected to the application of robotics within the military and the possible use of military robots against some populations not provided with this sophisticated technology, as well as problems of terrorism in robotics and problems connected with biorobotics, implantations and augmentation, were urging and serious enough to deserve a focused and tailor-made investigation.

It is absolutely clear that without a deep rooting of Roboethics in society, the   premises for the implementation of an artificial ethics in the robots’ control systems will be missing.

The Roboethics Roadmap is an Open Work, a Directory of Topics & Issues, susceptible to further development and improvement which will be defined by events in our technoscientific-ethical future. The authors are convinced that the different components of society working in Robotics, interested people and the stakeholders should intervene in the process of building a Roboethics Roadmap, in a grassroots science experimental case: the Parliaments, Academic Institutions, Research Labs, Public ethics committees, Professional Orders, Industry, Educational systems, the mass-media.

In the period of a year, the authors have carried out a tour d’horizon in the fields of Robotics: an overview of the state of the art in Robotics, and of the main ethical issues, driven by the most recent techno-scientific developments, which can only just be glimpsed.

A taxonomy of Robotics is not an easy task, precisely because the field is in a full bloom. A classification of Robotics is a work in progress, done simultaneously with the development of the field itself.

Aware of the classifications produced by the main Robotics organizations, which differ from one another on the basis of the approach, the authors of the Roboethics Roadmap have preferred to unite the many Robotics fields from a typological standpoint, according to shared homogeneity of the problems of interface towards the society.

The Roadmap embodies an overview of the main ethically sensitive areas in Robotics. For every field, the authors have tried to analyze the current situation rather than the imaginable. Thus, this first taxonomy gives priority to issues in applied ethics, rather than to theoretical generality, in the following areas:

• Humanoids (Artificial Mind, Artificial Body)
• Advanced production systems (Industrial robotics)
• Adaptive robot servants - intelligent homes (Indoor Service Robots, Ubiquitous Robotics)
• Network Robotics (Internet Robotics, Robot ecology)        
• Outdoor Robotics (Land, Sea, Air, Space)
• Health Care and Life Quality (Surgical Robotics, Bio-Robotics, Assistive Technology)
• Military Robotics (Intelligent Weapons, Robot Soldiers, Superhumans)
• Edutainment (Educational Robots, Robot Toys, Entertainment, Robotic Art)

It should be underlined that the present grid is not exhaustive; it is the first release of the Roboethics Roadmap, susceptible to be improved, and corrected.

In this paper we shall outline the process that originated the Roadmap and shall give an update on its latest developments, with the aim to disseminate its content and to collect further contributions to the effort to develop this new applied ethics.