Ronald C. Arkin is Third Speaker in Mudd Lecture Series Arkin is a roboticist and roboethicist.

By Erica Turman
October 11, 2019

Ronald C. Arkin, Regents’ Professor and director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, will deliver a public lecture at Washington and Lee University in Stackhouse Theater on Oct. 21 at 5 p.m. as part of the Mudd Center for Ethics series on “The Ethics of Technology.”

Arkin is a roboticist and roboethicist whose research interests include human-robot interaction, robot ethics, behavior-based reactive control and action-oriented perception for mobile robots and uncrewed aerial vehicles, hybrid deliberative/reactive software architectures, robot survivability, multi-agent robotic systems, bio-robotics and learning in autonomous systems. He has more than 170 technical publications in these areas. He is known for his book, “Behavior-based Robotics,” and for developing the motor schema technique in robot navigation.

“Professor Arkin is pre-eminent in the field of robotics, and his work on robo-ethical issues makes him a perfect fit for this year’s Mudd Center topic,” said Brian Murchison, director of the Mudd Center. “We are excited that, besides delivering a public lecture, he will spend time with W&L undergraduates in the computer science department’s course on Artificial Intelligence.”

Arkin’s other books include “Robot Colonies” and “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots.” He is the series editor for the MIT Press book series “Intelligent Robotics” and “Autonomous Agents,” and he has served on the Board of Governors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Society on Social Implications of Technology.

Arkin received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, a master’s from Stevens Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. When he made his contribution, Mudd said that “given the state of ethics in our current culture, this seems a fitting time to endow a center for the study of ethics, and my university is the fitting home.”

For full details on this series, visit the Mudd Center webpage.