Toward Virtuous Machines: When Ethics Meets Robotics

In very few years, the rapid evolution in Robotics research will lead to the designing and developing of intelligent autonomous robots behaving like humans. Robots will become pervasive and soon become part of humans’ lives. Beyond the technological aspects, to reach these objectives, the researchers and the roboticists must propose novel theories and find how to implement them to allow robots to align with social, moral, and legal cues. Roboethics aims to discuss ethical problems related to the design and use of autonomous robots. It aims at defining the conduct codes to instill virtuous AI in robots. This paper aims to overview the available issues and the proposed approaches to face the Roboethics problems, and it discusses artificial phronesis as a new way to face Roboethics problems. A possible implementation based on BDI agents is then outlined.