Collaborative Research: NRI: FND: Grounded Reasoning about Robot Capabilities for Law and Policy

该奖项支持一个研究项目，该项目的重点是开发工具和最佳实践，以促进法律和政策专家与机器人专家之间的有效合作。这种合作有两个目的：(1)更好地确保协作机器人的安全和有效开发；(2)制定有效和适当的法律和政策，管理它们在公共空间的部署。研究小组计划开发一种规范语言和交互工具，以便在非技术层面上对机器人和自主系统如何工作进行推理。再加上“如果呢？”通过案例研究，这将促进技术专家与他们的法律和政策同行之间的对话。规范语言和推理工具包的设计将与现有法律和政策框架内特定技术的快速变化同时发展，并为其提供支持。该小组将使用案例研究的法律概念在特定情况下进行推理。每个案例研究将包括对如何实施必要的机器人能力的完整描述，以及假设和潜在的故障。这项研究的结果将使法律和政策专家以及机器人专家能够在实施之前更准确地推断机器人系统与法律和政策框架的交集。具体地说，这将支持法律和政策专家更准确地设计有意义和可行的关于机器人的有效政策、立法和监管，并将支持机器人研究人员设计将法律和伦理问题纳入其设计选择的系统。研究团队将参与结构化语言范式(包括句法、语义和系统描述)的跨学科开发，以支持在法律和政策背景下关于机器人的扎根推理。这些语言范例将被实例化为交互体验，使得专家和非专家都能够进行具体化的推理和隐喻探索。这些体验将围绕一组特定的近期可行的机器人任务、现有的机器人能力和已知的故障模式、解释这些能力的隐喻以及突出常见误解的特定场景来开发。这些经验将根据它们在使非技术人员能够推理和预测自主系统行为方面的有效性进行评估。在法律和政策方面，研究小组将与这些领域的专家进行接触，(根据确定的任务)开发具体的假设性案例研究，说明如何从法律和政策的角度看待技术选择。具体地说，团队成员将合作开发一套相关的设计模式，帮助将技术概念映射到结构化语言和交互式可视化，开发交互式培训应用程序的原型套件，并为特定的机器人使用场景构建一组案例研究，使之能够围绕法律和政策以及机器人进行有意义的对话。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

ABSTRACT This award supports a research project that focuses on developing tools and best practices for promoting effective collaboration between legal and policy experts and roboticists. This collaboration serves two purposes: (1) to better ensure the safe and effective development of collaborative robots; and (2) to create effective and appropriate laws and policies governing their deployment in public spaces. The research team plans to develop a specification language and interactive tools for enabling reasoning about how robots and autonomous systems work, at a non-technical level. Combined with “What If?” case studies, this will facilitate dialog between technical experts and their legal and policy counterparts. The specification language and reasoning toolkit will be designed to evolve simultaneously with, and support, rapid changes in specific technology within the context of existing legal and policy frameworks. The team will use the legal concept of case studies to ground reasoning within a specific scenario. Each case study will consist of a complete description of how the necessary robot capabilities might be implemented, complete with assumptions and potential failures. The results of this research will enable legal and policy experts and roboticists to more accurately reason about the intersection of robotic systems and legal and policy frameworks before either are implemented. Specifically, this will support legal and policy experts in more accurately designing effective policy, legislation, and regulation around robotics that is meaningful and feasible, and will support robotic researchers in designing systems that incorporate legal and ethical questions into their design choices.The research team will engage in an interdisciplinary development of a structured language paradigm (comprised of syntax, semantics, and system descriptions) that supports grounded reasoning about robotics in law and policy contexts. These language paradigms will be instantiated as interactive experiences that enable embodied reasoning and metaphor exploration by experts and non-experts alike. These experiences will be developed around a specific set of near-term, feasible robot tasks, existing robot capabilities and known failure modes, metaphors to explain those capabilities, and specific scenarios that highlight common misconceptions. These experiences will be evaluated on their effectiveness in enabling non-technical people to reason about, and predict, autonomous system behavior. On the legal and policy side, the research team will engage with experts in these areas to develop specific hypothetical case studies (based on the identified tasks) that illustrate how to view technological choices through a law and policy lens. Specifically, team members will work collaboratively to develop a set of associated design patterns that assist in mapping technical concepts to the structured language and the interactive visualizations, develop a prototype suite of interactive training applications, and construct a set of case studies for specific robot-use scenarios that enables meaningful dialog around law and policy and robotics.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.