Ethical Violations in Contemporary Robotics Reasearch: Cases and Conceptual Analyses through AI and Robot Ethics Frameworks

The development of contemporary robotics—ranging from social assistive robotics (SAR), carebots, and human–robot interaction (HRI) to brain–computer interfaces (BCI) that control robotic arms—is increasingly intertwined with the human body, emotions, and social life, thereby heightening the risk of ethical violations at both the design and research levels. At the same time, the literature on robot ethics and general AI ethics is growing very rapidly but tends to be fragmented and difficult to operationalize for the engineering community. This article aims to present a critical narrative review of how ethical violations emerge in contemporary robotics research and how AI/robot ethics frameworks can be used to interpret and address them. Methodologically, this review adopts a narrative synthesis approach to fifteen selected articles (2020–2025), which are mapped into three relational categories: robot ethics (R), general AI ethics (A), and the intersection of robot–AI ethics (R ∩ A). The analysis is carried out thematically and comparatively by linking the columns on rationale, aims–scope, and main ethical focus to answer three research questions (RQ1–RQ3) related to cases, frameworks, and an integrative model of ethical violations.The findings show that violations and high-risk practices manifest in the form of deception and manipulation of trust in carebots and HRI, problematic BCI testing designs, and structural harm to vulnerable groups through AI policies and infrastructures. On the other hand, frameworks such as disability justice, Sustainable AI, eco-relational ethics, critiques of principled ethics and benchmarking, as well as the concept of care robot literacy provide powerful lenses to classify and critique these cases beyond the micro level of interaction. In conclusion, ethical violations in robotics research must be understood as multi-layered phenomena that connect micro-level interaction, meso-level governance, and macro-level structures. The implication is that engineers and researchers need to integrate contextual, participatory, and structural ethical evaluation into the design, experimentation, and reporting cycles of robotics research.

Robotics-AI Ethics, human-robot interaction

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