Responsible Robotics Compass: Navigating the Future of Robotics Responsibly

With the rapid evolution of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the significance of considering the ethical implications of these advancements has never been more critical. RoboCompass emerges as a pioneering solution to address these concerns, offering a comprehensive assessment framework that empowers robotics manufacturers, companies, researchers, EU-funded projects, and policymakers to make informed decisions that shape a responsible robotic future.

This cutting-edge tool provides a comprehensive overview of the aspects that influence the robot’s acceptance. These aspects are categorized as follows:

1. Socio-economic: Measure how the robot's development, deployment, and usage affect various societal and economic areas.
2. Human Experience: Evaluate how the robot's presence impacts human well-being and trust, whether in professional or public settings.
3. Environmental Impact: Assess the ecological footprint of the robot throughout its lifecycle.
4. Legals: Gauge the risk of legal issues related to robot accountability, governance, and regulatory compliance.
5. Data: Examine how the robot and its systems collect, manage, and utilise data.

With this tool, users can customize their priorities, aligning them with their unique customer requirements and use cases; address a series of risk and mitigation questions related to the previously mentioned categories; have a comprehensive overview of their assessment score; and generate a detailed report with personalized recommendations for improvements.

The Responsible Robotics Compass has a unique value: it has been developed over the last three years following a bottom-up approach, selecting the topics of interest and scoring method based on consultations of the general population, robotics community and policymakers. It is free, open-access and continuously improved.

RoboCompass can be found within the Innovation section of the AI-on-Demand platform, a community-driven channel designed to empower European research and innovation in AI, and it comes within the framework of Robotics4EU (R4EU), a project funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. R4EU's objective is to facilitate broader adoption of AI robots while advocating for responsible robotics across all stakeholders, thereby promoting societal acceptance of robotics solutions.

Robotics4EU is a 3-year-long project, composed of 7 organizations from 6 EU countries representing expertise in robotics.