RPI researchers design robots to do the right thing

Selmer Bringsjord, head of the Cognitive Science Department at RPI, and Naveen Govindarajulu, a post-doctoral researcher working with him, are focused on how to engineer ethics into a robot so that moral logic can be intrinsic to these artificial beings. Last month in Chicago, during the first symposium on ethics and technology by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the two RPI researchers demonstrated a kind of "morality" software in a robot simulation that involved guarding a supposed enemy. In Bringsjord's approach…