Toward Morally Sensitive Robotic Communication

As robots become more capable, they will become increasingly useful in a widening variety of contexts and applications. Non-roboticists in these diverse contexts will need to interact with their new robotic colleagues to facilitate productive human-robot teaming and comfortable coexistence in social environments. Natural language provides a medium for these interactions that will allow direct and fluid communication between robots and nearly all humans, without requiring specialized protocols or hardware. Indeed, many researchers have been actively investigating the problems of natural language understanding and generation in robots for some time [1]–[3].