Description

This doctoral research, configured as a compilation of academic publications, responds to the need to address the deployment of social robotics from the ethics perspective, especially regarding its assistive branch. This need is explained by the emergence of this subfield of intelligent robotics as a tool provider for healthcare professional activities and by the deficiencies of the ethical reflection accompanying it, which derive from an improper disciplinary articulation of ethics on social robotics.
Therefore, the current thesis obeys two primary purposes, addressed through this work's two main chapters.

The first goal is establishing a conceptual framework for a proper approach to social robotics through a double task. On the one hand, mainly in Chapter 2, the disciplinary foundations for the ethical approach to this technology are grounded through clarifying three key questions: why does technology require ethics, what kind of ethics is it, and what is the statute of technology ethics? On the other hand, in Chapter 3, some specific ethical coordinates for social assistive robotics are defined; that is, coordinates to identify and analyse the normatively relevant issues for its deployment, in line with the statute of applied ethics appropriate to the ethics of technology.

The second goal is to reexamine some central ethical issues of social assistive robotics, thereby entering into dialogue with the current academic discussion on this theme. To that end, Chapter 3 puts forward a critical analysis of the reflection on this technology and the deficiencies of the prevailing ethical approach, which is characterized by a neglect of the political dimension of technology. In response to such deficits, social assistive robotics is examined from one of the previously defined ethical coordinates, namely freedom, thereby expanding the scope of normative consideration beyond the sphere of dyadic human-robot interaction.

Additionally, given the need for innovative teaching programs on ethics in university engineering degrees, the thesis proposes a teaching plan for a technology ethics subject of 6ECTS credits.

The work is under the scope of the following projects:

• MdM: Unit of Excellence María de Maeztu (web)
• CLOTHILDE: Cloth manipulation learning from demonstration (web)