Towards Verifiably Ethical Robot Behaviour

Abstract: 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 aconsequence 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.