Towards Verifiably Ethical Robot Behaviour
This addresses the challenge of verifiable ethics in robotics, which is crucial for safety and trust in autonomous systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing verification techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring ethical behavior in autonomous systems by extending a known agent verification approach to verify the correctness of ethical decision-making in a consequence engine, resulting in a method to confirm that the most ethical options are selected.
Ensuring that autonomous systems work ethically is both complex and difficult. However, the idea of having an additional `governor' that assesses options the system has, and prunes them to select the most ethical choices is well understood. Recent work has produced such a governor consisting of a `consequence engine' that assesses the likely future outcomes of actions then applies a Safety/Ethical logic to select actions. Although this is appealing, it is impossible to be certain that the most ethical options are actually taken. In this paper we extend and apply a well-known agent verification approach to our consequence engine, allowing us to verify the correctness of its ethical decision-making.