New robotics technologies are being used for environmental research, and engineers and ecologists are exploring ways of integrating an array of different sorts of robots into ecosystems as a means of responding to the unprecedented environmental changes that mark the onset of the Anthropocene. These efforts introduce new roles that robots may play in our environments, potentially crucial new forms of human dependence on such robots, and new ways that robots can enhance life quality and environmental health. These efforts at once introduce a variety of new and unprecedented ethical concerns. This work uses a previously developed functional taxonomy of kinds of environmental robots to develop a list of key ethical questions to push forward the sub-field and study of Environmental Robot Ethics. By identifying unique concerns raised by the different sorts of existing environmental robotics technologies, this paper aims to provide resources for further critical analysis of the ethical issues and tradeoffs environmental robots present.

Elderly care receivers are extensively and profoundly affected by interacting with care robots. This paper focuses on autonomy as a core value in elderly care and demonstrates its complexity. Few studies have been able to address this complexity in elderly care in the robot era. Therefore, a taxonomy of autonomy is introduced to discern the complexity and tailored as a tool to evaluate ethical aspects of the effects of care robots on autonomy in elderly care. It concludes that this taxonomy is instrumental for impact assessments of care robots on care receivers' autonomy both retrospectively and prospectively.

In this paper, we argue that the characteristics of digital platforms challenge the fundamental assumptions of value sensitive design (VSD). Traditionally, VSD methods assume that we can identify relevant values during the design phase of new technologies. The underlying assumption is that there is only epistemic uncertainty about which values will be impacted by a technology. VSD methods suggest that one can predict which values will be affected by new technologies by increasing knowledge about how values are interpreted or understood in context. In contrast, digital platforms exhibit a novel form of uncertainty, namely, ontological uncertainty: even with full information and overview, it cannot be foreseen what users or developers will do with digital platforms. Hence, predictions about which values are affected might not hold. In this paper, we suggest expanding VSD methods to account for value dynamism resulting from ontological uncertainty. Our expansions involve (1) extending VSD to the entire lifecycle of a platform, (2) broadening VSD through the addition of reflexivity, i.e. second-order learning about what values to aim at, and (3) adding specific tools of moral sandboxing and moral prototyping to enhance such reflexivity. While we illustrate our approach with a short case study about ride-sharing platforms such as Uber, our approach is relevant for other technologies exhibiting ontological uncertainty as well, such as machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence.

The use of drones in public healthcare is suggested as a means to improve efficiency under constrained resources and personnel. This paper begins by framing drones in healthcare as a social experiment where ethical guidelines are needed to protect those impacted while fully realizing the benefits the technology offers. Then we propose an ethical framework to facilitate the design, development, implementation, and assessment of drones used in public healthcare. Given the healthcare context, we structure the framework according to the four bioethics principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice, plus a fifth principle from artificial intelligence ethics: explicability. These principles are abstract which makes operationalization a challenge; therefore, we suggest an approach of translation according to a values hierarchy whereby the top-level ethical principles are translated into relevant human values within the domain. The resulting framework is an applied ethics tool that facilitates awareness of relevant ethical issues during the design, development, implementation, and assessment of drones in public healthcare.

In this work the preliminary design of HealthDrone, a cargo drone for blood sample transportation in Denmark, is performed using the value-sensitive design (VSD) methodology and an ethical framework. The ethical framework includes five ethical principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, human autonomy, justice, and explicability. First, a commercially available Wingcopter 178 drone is analyzed in the context of the blood sample transportation case; then, a redesigned drone is proposed. The redesigned drone is renamed FrugalDrone to signify its main beneficent characteristic: providing inexpensive transportation of blood samples. FrugalDrone's design addresses other relevant human values including health, safety, accountability, and environmental impacts. This work is aimed at the drone design community and interdisciplinary researchers. It contributes by evolving the VSD methodology via an ethical framework and applies it to the emerging domain of drones in public healthcare.

While the design of sex robots is still in the early stages, the social implications of the potential proliferation of sex robots into our lives has been heavily debated by activists and scholars from various disciplines. What is missing in the current debate on sex robots and their potential impact on human social relations is a targeted look at the boundedness and bodily expressivity typically characteristic of humans, the role that these dimensions of human embodiment play in enabling reciprocal human interactions, and the manner in which this contrasts with sex robot-human interactions. Through a fine-grained discussion of these themes, rooted in fruitful but largely untapped resources from the field of enactive embodied cognition, we explore the unique embodiment of sex robots. We argue that the embodiment of the sex robot is constituted by what we term restricted expressivity and a lack of bodily boundedness and that this is the locus of negative but also potentially positive implications. We discuss the possible benefits that these two dimensions of embodiment may have for people within a specific demographic, namely some persons on the autism spectrum. Our preliminary conclusion-that the benefits and the downsides of sex robots reside in the same capability of the robot, its restricted expressivity and lack of bodily boundedness as we call it-demands we take stock of future developments in the design of sex robot embodiment. Given the importance of evidence-based research pertaining to sex robots in particular, as reinforced by Nature (2017) for drawing correlations and making claims, the analysis is intended to set the stage for future research.

Environmental scientists and engineers have been exploring research and monitoring applications of robotics, as well as exploring ways of integrating robotics into ecosystems to aid in responses to accelerating environmental, climatic, and biodiversity changes. These emerging applications of robots and other autonomous technologies present novel ethical and practical challenges. Yet, the critical applications of robots for environmental research, engineering, protection and remediation have received next to no attention in the ethics of robotics literature to date. This paper seeks to fill that void, and promote the study of environmental robotics. It provides key resources for further critical examination of the issues environmental robots present by explaining and differentiating the sorts of environmental robotics that exist to date and identifying unique conceptual, ethical, and practical issues they present.