The Billion-Dollar Robot Question–How Can We Make Sure They’re Safe?

by Matt McFarland, The Washington Post 

Ready or not, the robots are coming. There will be cars driving themselves, with no steering wheel for us to grab. Delivery drones will maneuver around patio furniture and vegetable gardens to drop packages in backyards. Delivery carts on sidewalks will hum along, bringing pizza boxes to our front doors.

These systems will operate without any humans directly keeping an eye on them. This raises a huge question that everyone from government regulators to tech companies and safety advocates are wrestling with. If robots are driving us around, delivering our meals, baby-sitting the elderly, replacing doctors in operating rooms and fighting in wars, can we trust them to behave safely?

The advent of unsupervised robots raises the question of how to ensure their safety, especially as they challenge traditional methods of safety assessment and regulation. For example, some are calling for the establishment of a new U.S. government agency to oversee robot regulation, given the lack of expertise in conventional agencies.

“The government itself is not acting as a repository of [robotics] expertise here,” notes University of Washington professor Ryan Calo. “I worry quite a bit that government will over-rely on experts from industry because they don’t have their own internal knowledge.”

Some states are taking the initiative, with California’s Department of Motor Vehicles releasing draft guidelines for autonomous cars, but without addressing fully driverless vehicles. Google has criticized the state’s move, noting the point of its autonomous cars program is to improve road safety.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Transportation is mainly concentrating on communications signals between autonomous vehicles, instead of determining how safe driverless cars will be. The University of Michigan’s Ryan Eustice suggests the robotics regulatory agency Calo envisions could employ a mix of hardware testing, laps on test tracks, tests in a virtual simulator, and mileage driven on public roads as a way to assess autonomous vehicles for licensing. Read the article