Robot Constitution: Autonomous Systems Governance

• Robot Constitution is a formalized set of constraints that govern behavior, rights, and responsibilities of autonomous robotic systems.
• Modern approaches blend top-down, human-written laws with bottom-up, data-driven techniques to refine rule sets over time.
• Key challenges include ensuring semantic safety, explainability, and resilience against adversarial and emergent behaviors.

A Robot Constitution is a formalized set of constraints, principles, and enforcement mechanisms designed to govern the behavior, rights, and responsibilities of autonomous robotic systems. It can be implemented at multiple levels: as natural-language or machine-interpretable rulesets (moral/ethical), as formal control architectures (controller-level constraints), and as codified legal frameworks (societal governance and regulation). Modern approaches encompass both top-down human-written laws (e.g., Asimov’s Laws) and bottom-up, data-driven generation and refinement of rule sets through Constitutional AI and continuous benchmarking, with increasing emphasis on semantic safety, governance, explainability, and resilience to adversarial and emergent behaviors (Agrawal, 2010, Vanderelst et al., 2016, Yigit et al., 2018, Xu et al., 12 Oct 2025, Zhang, 7 Apr 2025, Sermanet et al., 11 Mar 2025).

1. Foundational Principles and Historical Context

The concept of a robot constitution traces its philosophical and technical lineage to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which formalize a strict law hierarchy:

• Law 1 (Non-maleficence): “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”
• Law 2 (Obedience): “A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”
• Law 3 (Self-preservation): “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

This law ordering (L₁ ≻ L₂ ≻