ICRA 2014 Workshop on Robotics and Military Applications

ICRA 2014

The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is undoubtedly one of the largest conferences in robotics. The conference covers everything from nano-robots to exoskeletons to artificial intelligence to human-robot interaction. This year, the conference will be held from May 31st to June 7th in Hong Kong.

This year, ICRA will have a workshop on “Robotics and Military Applications : From Current Research and Deployments to Legal and Ethical Questions“. This feels timely, given that the UN is scheduled to discuss autonomous weapons systems in May and the recent discovery of drones supposedly sent from North Korea were found spying in South Korea earlier this month.

Organized by Quang-Cuong Pham, (NTU, Singapore) and Ludovic Righetti (MPI, Germany), this full day workshop will be held on June 1, 2014 (Sun), from 9:00 – 15:40 at ICRA.

If you will be going to ICRA or will be in Hong Kong for other reasons, it might be a good opportunity for you to drop by and check out what some of the experts have to say about robots for military applications.

Check out the workshop website for what’s been planned for the day: https://mini-symposium-tokyo.info/ICRA2014/

You’ll find that Dr. Noel Sharkey, one of the key members behind the initiatives International Committee for Robot Arms Control and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, will be there. So is Dr. George Bekey, who has been actively speaking and writing about roboethics topics for many, many years  including co-editing of the book, Robot Ethics, published in 2012.