"Ethics and robots is becoming more of a pressing issue — we can't wait until they're in our homes and on our streets," he said. "We need to work on it now and make sure robots behave in ethically sound fashion."

Scheutz is not alone in that belief.

Yueh-Hsuan Weng, a research associate and co-founder of the ROBOLAW.ASIA Initiative at Peking University, says we need a set of laws that will guide how humans interact with robots.

Whereas Scheutz is more focused on how to create robots with the moral capabilities to adhere to accepted ethical principles, Weng is arguing for the creation of laws to address this problem.

"Maybe robots are OK to be treated as 'any other product' at the moment, but when the degree of autonomy has advanced much more, maybe we will need to think of more specific rules and regulations to accommodate the advanced intelligent robots and robot systems," Weng told Tech Insider.