Alan Winfield's Web Log

Sooner or later there will be fatal accident caused by a driverless car. It's not a question of if, but when. What happens immediately f...

Could we make a moral machine? A robot capable of choosing or moderating its actions on the basis of ethical rules..? This was how I opened ...

If you're in the business of making ethical robots, then sooner or later you have to face the question: how ethical is your ethical robo...

In March 2013 I was interviewed by Peter Asaro for the IEEE.tv Oral History of Robotics series. That interview has now been published, and...

This post is just a quick update on our ethical robots research. Our  initial ethical robot experiments were done with e-puck robots. Gr...

Last week I found a couple of copyright violations. Am I upset? Not at all - actually I'm delighted that stuff I did in 1983 is alive an...

Our latest paper from the Artificial Culture project has just been published:  On the Evolution of Behaviors through Embodied Imitation . ...

It was a NAO robot fitted with a 3D printed set of goggles, so that the robot has two real cameras on its head (the eyes of the NAO robot a...

I spent a rare few hours in the lab the last few days, actually doing research. Or at least attempting to. Actually I made no progress at a...

Imagine a swarm of microscopic robots that we inject into the vascular system: the swarm swims to the source of the problem, then either del...

Imagine this situation. A large company decides to significantly increase the level of automation at one of its facilities. A facility that ...

Evolutionary robotics has been around for about 20 years: it's about 15 years since Stefano Nolfi and Dario Floreano published their se...

The question  Robotics by Invitation  asked its panel in November 2014, was: What does the first successful landing on a comet mean for th...

Dear robotics and AI researcher Do you use simulation as a research tool? If you write papers with results based on simulation and submit ...

I was very pleased to be invited to Science, Innovation and Society: achieving Responsible Research and Innovation last week. I was asked t...

A couple of weeks ago I was a panelist on a public debate at the 2014 Battle of Ideas . The title of the debate was  The robots are coming:...

Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously characterised subjective experience as “something that it is like to be…” and suggested that for a bat, f...

Several weeks ago I wrote about our work on robots with internal models : robots with a simulation of themselves and their environment insi...