Robots are slowly, but certainly, entering people’s professional and private lives. They require the attention of regulators due to the challenges they present to existing legal frameworks and the new legal and ethical questions they raise. This paper discusses four major regulatory dilemmas in the field of robotics: how to keep up with technological advances; how to strike a balance between stimulating innovation and the protection of fundamental rights and values; whether to affirm prevalent social norms or nudge social norms in a different direction; and, how to balance effectiveness versus legitimacy in techno-regulation. The four dilemmas are each treated in the context of a particular modality of regulation: law, market, social norms, and technology as a regulatory tool; and for each, we focus on particular topics – such as liability, privacy, and autonomy – that often feature as the major issues requiring regulatory attention. The paper then highlights the role and potential of the European framework of rights and values, responsible research and innovation, smart regulation and soft law as means of dealing with the dilemmas.

We designed an fMRI experiment comparing perception of human faces and robotic faces producing emotional expressions. The purpose of our experiment was to investigate engagement of different parts of the social brain by viewing these animate and inanimate agents. Both human and robotic face expressions evoked activity in face-responsive regions in the fusiform gyrus and STS and in the putative human mirror neuron system. These results suggest that these areas mediate perception of agency, independently of whether the agents are living or not. By contrast, the human faces evoked stronger activity than did robotic faces in the medial pFC and the anterior temporal cortex—areas associated with the representation of others' mental states (theory of mind), whereas robotic faces evoked stronger activity in areas associated with perception of objects and mechanical movements. Our data demonstrate that the representation of the distinction between animate and inanimate agents involves areas that participate in attribution of mental stance.

The slogan “robots will pervade our environment” has become a reality. Drones and ground robots are used for commercial purposes while semi-autonomous driving systems are standard accessories to traditional cars. However, while our eyes have been riveted on dangers and accidents arising from drones falling and autonomous cars’ crashing, much less attention has been ported to dangers arising from the imminent arrival of robots that share the floor with pedestrians and will mix with human crowds. These robots range from semi or autonomous mobile platforms designed for providing several kinds of service, such as assistant, patrolling, tour-guide, delivery, human transportation, etc. We highlight and discuss potential sources of injury emerging from contacts of robots with pedestrians through a set of case studies. We look specifically at dangers deriving from robots moving in dense crowds. In such situations, contact will not only be unavoidable, but may be desirable to ensure that the robot moves with the flow. As an outlook toward the future, we also offer some thoughts on the psychological risks, beyond the physical hazards, arising from the robot’s appearance and behaviour. We also advocate for new policies to regulate mobile robots traffic and enforce proper end user’s training.

We report on the design and the experimental results of DustCart, a wheeled autonomous robot for door-to-door garbage collection. DustCart is able to navigate in urban environments avoiding static and dynamic obstacles and to interact with human users. The robot is managed by an Ambient Intelligence system (AmI) through a wireless connection: it navigates to collect garbage bags to the houses of users and then moves to discharge the collected waste to a dedicated area. The architecture, navigation and localization systems are described along with the results achieved in different urban sites. In particular, a localization approach based on optical beacons was used and guaranteed position errors sufficient for a safe robot navigation. We report also the first results of a long-term experimentation of the DustCart robot in Peccioli, a small town of Tuscany (Italy). This can be considered as a first step in using robotics in the everyday life of a real town for providing a real service.