Ronald Arkin

Regents' Professor, College of Computing, Georgia Tech

Ronald C. Arkin received the B.S. Degree from the University of Michigan, the M.S. Degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987. He then assumed the position of Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he now holds the rank of Regents' Professor and is the Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory. During 1997-98, Professor Arkin served as STINT visiting Professor at the Centre for Autonomous Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. From June-September 2005, Prof. Arkin held a Sabbatical Chair at the Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan and then served as a member of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Group at LAAS/CNRS in Toulouse, France from October 2005-August 2006.

Dr. Arkin's research interests include behavior-based reactive control and action-oriented perception for mobile robots and unmanned aerial vehicles, hybrid deliberative/reactive software architectures, robot survivability, multiagent robotic systems, biorobotics, human-robot interaction, robot ethics, and learning in autonomous systems. He has over 170 technical publications in these areas. Prof. Arkin has written a textbook entitled Behavior-Based Robotics published by MIT Press in May 1998 and has co-edited (with G. Bekey) a book entitled Robot Colonies published in 1997.

He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Intelligent Systems and the Journal of Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing, as a member of the Editorial Boards of Autonomous Robots, Machine Intelligence and Robotic Control, Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics, Journal of Field Robotics, International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, and the Journal of Applied Intelligence and is the Series Editor for the MIT Press book series Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents. He was also elected to serve two consecutive 3 year terms on the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in both 1999 and 2002, serves as the co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Ethics, and also on the National Science Foundation's Robotics Council from 2001-2002. In 2001, he received the Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2003, and is a member of AAAI and ACM.

As part of the session on Architecture of AGI Systems at AGI-08, he presented "Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture." The presentation touched on the theory and formalisms for the implementation of an ethical control and reasoning system in an autonomous robotic system. The ethical controls are aimed at being potentially suitable for constraining lethal actions so that they fall within the bounds prescribed by the Laws of War and Rules of Engagement based upon existing deliberative and reactive autonomous robotic architectures. Part 3 was delivered at the Technology in Wartime Conference in January of 2008 at the Stanford University Law School. Part 1 on Motivation and Philosophy was presented most recently at the March Human Robot Interaction Conference in Amsterdam. The 120-page technical report is available via the Georgia Tech Mobile Robots Lab website.

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Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture
Part 2: Formalization for Ethical Control

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Technology in Wartime Conference, Governing Lethal Behavior Part 3