Ethical Considerations for Autonomous Vehicle Behavior: Approach and Framework

The deployment of autonomous vehicles will demand consistent and agreed-upon behavior in the form of standard driving rules for maneuvers (e.g., lane changes) as well as defined responses to specific road situations such as giving way to emergency vehicles and when crashes are unavoidable. This paper provides an approach to the implementation of ethical considerations for highly automated vehicles and autonomous vehicles by suggesting standard driving rules and a framework for the generation and evaluation of these rules. This framework is generic and can instantiate any set of ethical concepts (e.g., Western or Eastern schools of ethics) and cultural norms (e.g., European, Latin American, Asian) and be applied to other technological domains such as robot ethics and AI ethics.