Robot Ethics

My postdoctoral research at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence investigates the identification and mitigation of ethical issues of social robots. I use methods including community participation, socio-technical analysis, and design investigation.

A red-haired woman with glasses sets up two robots on a table.

Conducting an investigation on the socio-technical ethical dimensions of well-being robots with communities.

This project is ongoing, so I will keep updating this page!

 

Check out these publications related to the project:

  • [In review.] Laban, G., Spitale, M., Axelsson, M., Abbasi, N.I., Gunes, H. (2025). Critical Insights about Robots for Mental Wellbeing. (17 pages). [arXiv]
  • Axelsson, M., & Shevlin, H. (2026, March). Disambiguating Anthropomorphism and Anthropomimesis in Human-Robot Interaction. In Companion Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 855-859). [arXiv] [Publisher]
  • Axelsson, M., & Sikau, L. L. (2025, November). Choreographing Trash Cans: On Speculative Futures of Weak Robots in Public Spaces. In Proceedings of the 38th International BCS Human-Computer Interaction Conference (pp. 309-313). [arXiv] [Publisher]
  • Axelsson, M. (2025, November). Speculative Design of Equitable Robotics: Queer Fictions and Futures. In Proceedings of the 38th International BCS Human-Computer Interaction Conference (pp. 304-308). [arXiv] [Publisher]
  • Axelsson, M., Cheong, J., Nyrup, R., Gunes, H. (2025). Who Owns The Robot?: Four Ethical and Socio-technical Questions about Wellbeing Robots in the Real World through Community Engagement. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 249-264). [arXiv] [Publisher]