Service robots will increasingly operate within society and collaborate with humans to support everyday-life tasks . A Service Robot is "a type of robot that performs useful tasks for humans or equipment, excluding industrial automation applications". The service robotics market is estimated to reach a value of $24 billion by 2022. Service robots will increasingly be multipurpose, thus requiring an after-production "programming" phase, i.e., the specification of the mission to be accomplished. Since the mission heavily depends on the specific needs of customers and on the operating environment, it cannot be anticipated during production, it varies potentially daily, and need to be performed by experts of the domain in which the robots will be used. However, experts of the domain are not necessarily experts in robotics or ICT. Thus, there is the need for a democratization in the programming and use of robots.
While accomplishing a mission, a robot is required to obey laws and follow specific regulations, being them safety or security standards or ethical constraints . Since the actions of service robots affect directly or indirectly humans, which can have an active or passive role in a mission, it becomes of key importance to guarantee the compliance to ethical rules. In RoboChor, we focus on scenarios concerning multiple distributed and heterogeneous service robots (Multi-Robot Systems - MRSs) that collaborate with each other and with humans in a shared space to accomplish a common (globally specified) mission, while guaranteeing the preservation of ethical constraints of both the mission and the involved humans.
The contributions of RoboChor are:
RoboChor will define a DSL for specifying the robot choreography and ethics. Automated synthesis techniques will be defined for realizing the choreography, hence programming the robots and coordinating their interaction in a way that the specified mission is accomplished. The choreography specification, beyond the involved robots, considers the humans the robots interact with in the shared space, while accounting for the specified ethical preferences. RoboChor will employ synthesis techniques that, given as input the global mission specification, automatically generate the correct-by-construction logic needed for coordinating the robots and their interactions with humans, as well as the environment, in a way that the specified mission is accomplished in the correct and morally good manner.