Image: Victor H/Shutterstock
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Sellafield nuclear plant, which was suggested as a potential testing facility for robots. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Chris Eaton
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But Bertolini says that mindset should ideally extend to all aspects of the law, from potential human rights violations to insurance and liability issues. Take the old autonomous car chestnut: Who's liable if a car with no driver crashes?And for each different piece of tech developed, new issues arise. I asked Bertolini what exactly constituted a robot in terms of the legal discussion, and he said it was almost impossible to answer.It conjures images of independent, autonomous systems, but that definition wouldn't cover robotic devices such as bionic prostheses, for instance. And in any case, you'd expect the law to treat a Roomba vacuum cleaner very differently to a Predator drone.For the purpose of the RoboLaw project, which will suggest regulatory proposals to the European Commission this year, researchers are instead looking at different applications of robotic systems separately. But that takes time, and there's a constant race against the progression of technology itself. If new regulations and guidelines that take into account new technologies aren't developed fast enough, judges have to make decisions based on whatever existing laws they have—which might not be the most appropriate.Are we ready? I asked Bertolini. Projects like RoboLaw are working on it, he said, but added, "It would probably be quite problematic to let a driverless car vehicle drive on European roads tomorrow morning." Even apparently trivial niggles can cause consternation—like the fact that a vehicle is actually defined as something with a driver.It's very hard for the law to keep the pace of technological development.
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An autonomous car (in the US). Image: Flickr/Ken Conley
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Getting ahead in the regulatory game must be a careful balance between the haste of getting new technologies to market first and the more leisurely pace of addressing legitimate concerns.Which is all to say that we need to keep the ball rolling. David Lane, chair of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems group that put together the report for the Technology Strategy Board, said his group believed the UK could achieve 10 percent of the global market share of the robotics industry by 2025, but the country isn't at the forefront yet. In fact, robotics expert Noel Sharkey told the BBC we'd "already slipped well behind."That could, however, be all the more reason to focus first and foremost on regulation. While the UK hasn't really been at the forefront of developing autonomous car tech, for instance (though there is notable work going on such as the RobotCar project at Oxford), it announced a review of regulation and legislation at the end of last year with the aim of staking the country's claim as a testing ground instead. It's a clever way of playing catch-up and attracting companies to the UK's shores.As the report alludes to, the point at which technologies are taken to market—out of the lab and into the real world—is a pretty sweet spot to corner. "Our vision is to reinforce a RAS ecosystem in the UK that will develop skills and allow ideas and innovation to be created and tested in the market place, ahead of international competitors," it says.There are a whole host of points that play into the robotics and autonomous systems strategy (not least of all something even more boring than regulation: financing), but if the UK can nail its ambitions to create "a transparent regulatory environment for RAS deployment," it might just carve itself a niche as an incubator, if not an innovator.Obviously it would be a completely new field, so it is going to require new regulations.