Trust Me, I'm a Robot With robots now emerging from their industrial cages and moving into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from harming people. Inspired by the Pugwash Conferences—an international group of scientists, academies and activists founded in 1957 to campaign for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons the new group of robo-ethicists met earlier this year in Genoa, Italy, and announced their initial findings in March at the European Robotics Symposium in Palermo, Sicily. 'Security and safety are the big concerns,' says Henrik Christensen, chairman of the European Robotics Network at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Is 'system malfunction' a justifiable defence for a robotic fighter plane that contravenes (违反) the Geneva Convention and mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? 'These questions may seem hard to understand but in the next few years they will become increasingly relevant,' says Dr. Christensen. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe's World Robotics Survey, in 2002 the number of domestic and service robots more than tripled, nearly surpassing their industrial counterparts. By the end of 2003 there were more than 600,000 robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers—a figure predicted to rise to more than 4m by the end of next year. Japanese industrial firms are racing to build humanoid robots to act as domestic helpers for the elderly, and South Korea has set a goal that 100% of house holds should have domestic robots by 2020. In light of all this, it is crucial that we start to think about safety guidelines now, says Dr. Christensen. Stop right there So what exactly is being done to protect us from these mechanical menaces? 'Not enough,' says Blay Whitby. This is hardly surprising given that the field of 'safety-critical computing' is barely a decade old, he says. But things are changing, and researchers are increasingly taking an interest in trying to make robots safer. One approach, which .sounds simple enough, is try to pro gram them to avoid contact with people altogether. But this is much harder than it sounds. Get ting a robot to navigate across a cluttered room is difficult enough without having to take into account what its various limbs or appendages might bump into along the way. 'Regulating the behaviour of robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self-learning mechanisms built into them,' says Gianmarco Veruggio. 'As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to predict fully,' he says, 'since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behaviour as they go.' Then there is the question of unpredictable failures. What happens if a robot's motors stop working, or it suffers a system failure just as it is performing heart surgery or handing you a cup of hot coffee? You can, of course, build in redundancy by adding backup systems, says Hirochika Inoue. But this guarantees nothing, he says. 'One hundred per cent safety is impossible through technology,' says Dr. Inoue. This is because ultimately no matter how thorough you are, you can not anticipate the unpredictable nature of human behaviour, he says. Or to put it another way, no matter how sophisticated your robot is at avoiding people, people might not always manage to avoid it, and could end up tripping over it and falling down the stairs. Legal problems In any case, says Dr. Inoue, the laws really just summarize commonsense principles that are already applied to the design of most modern appliances, both domestic and industr