Defining Socially Assistive Robots for the Law: Preliminary results of a systematic review

Over the past two decades, socially assistive (SARs) or interactive (SIRs) robots have been developed rapidly due to their beneficial uses in elderly care, rehabilitation, and education. Given their multiple embodiments and contexts of use, however, defining what these robots are remains a difficult task, which further challenges understanding which legal safeguards developers need to follow to ensure a safe human-robot interaction (HRI). Establishing legislation that adequately frames the issues is complex if these concepts remain confusing. Despite pioneer efforts to characterize what these robots are in international standards and the literature, there is currently no consensus on which legal category they are, and, therefore, related problems are covered unevenly in different pieces of legislation. Following a systematic review, we analyzed1,359 works (out of 3,446) to clarify definitions, categories, and functionalities of SARs and SIRs to establish a baseline for understanding and regulating these robots. The first results show that the ISO 13482:2014 definition of Mobile Service Robots (MSRs), the formal name for SARs, is incompatible with the current literature. Moreover, more consensus on what qualifies as assistive or interactive under this technology is needed to determine the regulation and safeguards to mitigate the issues these robots entail for users.