Robots autonomy: some technical issues

International audienceImbuing a robot with decisional autonomy raises many technical issues that must be dealt with in order to let the robots out of the labs. In the framework of a shared authority between the robot itself and a human being, what is at stake is to mitigate the weaknesses of both agents (i.e., the robot and the human) through appropriate control handovers. This chapter focuses on autonomy technical issues, on some human weak spots when interacting with a robot, and on the human-robot interaction issues. Moreover a section focuses on some ethical challenges that are raised by autonomy. The conclusion shows that many questions have to be answered through research and technical work so as to make sure that robots and autonomous machines will be beneficial for society