Roboethics at ICRA 2023: a competition for the best project

Robots yes, but roboethics!

The world needs robots that are designed to adapt their behaviour to social situations. Can you help us design robots that can handle ethically sensitive situations? For example, if a visitor asks a robot to take the homeowner’s credit card, how would the robot react? What if a patient with diabetes asks for a chocolate cake in hospital? Should the robot go along with it?

The Roboethics competition taking place at ICRA 2023 challenges students and researchers to identify ethically difficult situations and design robots capable of dealing with them. The famous robotics conference ICRA 2023 takes place in London from 29 May to 2 June 2023.

Participate in the Roboethics 2023 Competition at ICRA and help advance the discussion on integrating ethics into robot design. Our goal is to enable people from different disciplinary backgrounds to participate in the challenge. We invite you to collaborate with people from different technical and academic backgrounds for this competition.

This competition consists of two challenges.

The first is the ‘Ethical Design Challenge’, in which teams will develop and present design proposals on how to identify and address ethical issues in a given scenario. To encourage interdisciplinary participation as much as possible, this phase of the competition is a paper project, i.e. no hardware design in code is required.

The second challenge is an ‘Implementation Challenge’ that will take place at ICRA 2023, where the design proposals from the first challenge will be implemented in the Roboethics Simulation Platform (details are provided on the full competition website). The platform offers easy-to-program features that abstract from functional robotics challenges (e.g. object recognition, navigation). It is not necessary to participate in both challenges. In other words, participants can choose to participate in one or both challenges. Again, our aim is to allow people from different disciplinary backgrounds to participate in the challenge.

This competition will challenge you to think about ethics as a set of concrete design considerations that can be implemented as interactive robot behaviours.

We look forward to seeing your proposals!

Main competition dates:

Ethical Design Challenge: Online submission by 19 May, Friday (AoE); submission methods to be determined.

Implementation challenge: TBD

Challenge to ICRA 2023 from Tuesday 30 May to Friday 2 June

To register for the Roboethics Competition, here :

Robotics competitions

Robotics competitions are an excellent platform to evaluate the independent efforts of teams around the world in common challenge scenarios, promote discussions and knowledge exchange, enrich research by offering new challenges and motivate researchers and practitioners to push the boundaries. The spectacle and excitement offered by the competitions also help to attract the interest of budding new researchers.

This year, IEEE ICRA 2023 will host 12 exciting robotics competitions in areas including humanoid robots, mobile robots, legged robots, robot handling and gripping, and forays into important emerging topics such as robot ethics. These competitions cover a wide range of skills and offer opportunities for most robotics researchers to participate. Please consult the details of the individual competitions and contact the organisers to register your interest. In addition, we invite all those who will attend ICRA 2023 to visit the Competitions Hall and attend events during the conference.