From the University of Oslo, members of the group for Robotics and Intelligent Systems and the Section for Autonomous Systems and Sensor Technologies (AUTOSENS) contribute to NCEI. Our team at UiO leads work packages 3 and 10 of the center, described further below.
WP3: “Body-and-Brain” Computational Co-design (Lead: Kyrre Glette). The complete set of autonomy developments envisioned in NCEI shall be tightly integrated with a computational process for the design of robot bodies. Accordingly, robot bodies and their mechatronic realization (i.e., the “phenotype”) shall be encoded in concise parametric terms (i.e., the “genotype”) and techniques such as evolutionary algorithms will be employed to computationally adapt robot bodies driven by the performance of their autonomy policies in navigation and manipulation tasks within a certain class of environments and missions of interest.
WP10: Ethics in Embodied AI (Lead: Jim Tørresen). Embodied AI systems introduce several unique ethical concerns and considerations given their physical presence and ability to interact with the world. As their cognitive and physical skills advance, we have a responsibility to pay attention to a set of issues: (a) Safety & Reliability, (b) Autonomy & Responsibility, (c) Privacy & Surveillance, (d) Bias & Discrimination, (e) Social & Psychological Impacts, (f) Labor & Economic Displacement, (g) Environment Sustainability, (h) Security & protection (i) Weaponization & dual use, (j) Legal & Regulatory Aspects, and (k) Existential & Philosophical Questions.
