The LADYBIRD Project

The LADYBIRD project starts in March 2017. More and more autonomous and semi-autonomous machines make decisions that have moral implications. Machine ethics as a discipline examines the possibilities and limits of moral machines. In this context, Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel developed various design studies and thus submitted proposals for their appearance and functions. He focused on animal-friendly machines which make morally sound decisions, and chatbots with specific skills. The project is about a service robot, which shall spare beneficial insects – a vacuum cleaner called LADYBIRD. An annotated decision tree modelled for this objective and a set of sensors will be used. Three students work from March to October in the practice project at the School of Business FHNW. Since 2013, the principal Oliver Bendel published several articles on LADYBIRD and other animal-friendly machines, e.g., „Ich bremse auch für Tiere (I also brake for animals)“ in the Swiss magazine inside.it. The robot will be the third prototype in the context of machine ethics at the School of Business FHNW. The first one was the GOODBOT (2013), the second one the LIEBOT (2016). All these machines can be described as simple moral machines.

Fig.: The robot should spare the ladybird