Meaningful Human Control of Autonomous Systems
An increasing number of autonomous systems are used in a human environment. This includes autonomous robots like self-driving cars and many other applications as well as autonomous weapon systems in modern conflicts. These systems, with different levels of autonomy, initially were intended to carry out dull, demanding and dangerous tasks to support humans. However, current systems are at the edge, if not already beyond, of becoming potentially dangerous to humans by taking life or death decisions with little or no human involvement. The research project “Meaningful Human Control − Autonomous Weapon Systems between Regulation and Reflection” (MeHuCo), rooted in the domain of peace and conflict research, addresses the increasing autonomy of robots and especially weapon systems and the problems that arise from a technological, social, legal and ethics perspective. This contribution focuses on physically demonstrating the technical options and limitations of autonomous robots in physical conflicts. Our demonstration scenario is a robot soccer competition between teams of humanoid robots and eventually between robots and humans.
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