The legal challenges of networked robotics: From the safety intelligence perspective

One of the reasons that future robots will enhance their intelligence and actions in an unstructured environment is because of their 'networked' feature. Current robot designs have difficulty in understanding unstructured environments due to the inherent diversity and unpredictability of phenomena in the real world. However, new developments such as ubiquitous computing, cloud computing, the Internet of things and next-generation internet technologies will make it easier for networked robots to obtain structured information about their physical environment. The formation of cloud-enabled robotics by advanced technology will be tightly integrated into the virtual and real world, and this will strengthen the impact of cyberspace to the real world. Although these developments may help reduce Open-Texture Risk from the networked robots, risk will be transferred from the physical world into the virtual world. In this paper, we will try to address some of the resulting legal implications. This paper is divided into four parts, the first part defines the meaning of cloud-enabled robotics; the second part analyzes how the Collective Dynamics derived from virtual and real world with autonomous behaviors by intelligent robots affect Open-Texture Risk to expand a Larger Range and bring a Deeper Impact; the third part explains the dispute of legal issues in future technology of cloud-enabled robotics; the final part analyzes the Safety Intelligence of cloud-enabled robotics in a long-term perspective, and the theoretical control framework that we propose in solving Open-Texture Risk. ? 2012 Springer-Verlag.EI