Best-Practice Approach for a Solution-Oriented Technology Assessment: Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in the Context of Human-Robot Collaboration

Future robots will process work tasks with a high degree of complexity even for small batch sizes in collaboration with the working person, simultaneously, and within a specified workplace. Due to the transformation from robots that are spatially and temporally separated from the working person and are programmed to execute tasks in a deterministic manner towards collaborative, adaptive lightweight robots, ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) should be considered. The purpose of this contribution is to determine how changing human-robot collaboration impacts technology. To this end potential ELSI problems and their possible causes and effects are identified and quantitatively analyzed based on the Aachen Model of Identification, Classification and Analysis of ethical, legal, and social Implications (AMICAI). Furthermore, the impacts of technology are identified and evaluated alongside potential risks, opportunities, and potentials of human-robot collaboration. This best-practice approach describes the results of applying AMICAI based on expert workshops focusing on the application example of a human-robot collaborative workplace in manufacturing.