CAREER: Computational Ethics in Human-Scale Autonomous Systems

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

The creation of intelligent systems that are autonomous, update their own objectives, and interact with humans in their daily lives, has long been a driving force in systems engineering, robotics, and Artificial Intelligence. Example systems include nursing robots in hospitals, self-driving vehicles, and worker bots collaborating with humans. An explicit ethical awareness in these systems is recognized as a necessary condition for successful daily interaction with humans. However, to this day, there are comparatively few algorithms, and even fewer tools, for designing ethics-equipped Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS), especially when integrated with a physical control loop. This research develops a computational theory and formal design tools for ethics-equipped embodied AIS. The project focuses on the design tasks of model-checking, controller synthesis, and constrained learning from data, of formalized ethical guidelines. Such guidelines take the form of statements of Obligation (`The robot ought to care for the patient in greater pain'), Permission (`The robot is permitted to offer a mask to a contagious patient') and Prohibition (`The robot is forbidden from factoring gender into care decisions'). The investigators formalize such Obligations, Permissions and Prohibitions in a deontic logic developed as part of the project. Methods from software engineering, optimal control, and deep learning, are employed to create a design pipeline that allows transparent and rigorous experimentation with different guidelines. An education plan for undergraduate and high-school students complements the research’s goal of enabling communities and professionals from different disciplines to assess the claims of autonomous systems manufacturers and determine their alignment with community values. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.