Operationalising Normative Rules in Autonomous Robotic Systems Through Context-Oriented Programming

摘要

The increasing sensitivity to human aspects in autonomous systems engineering calls for principled approaches to embed ethical and normative concerns into their behaviour. Indeed, recent research has focused on expressing and validating sets of social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural (SLEEC) concerns as rules. However, existing work is limited to rule specification or verification, leaving the problem of semantic-preserving operationalisation of ethical rules in autonomous systems largely unaddressed. For this purpose, we provide an operational solution for ethical-aware autonomous systems, applied to the realm of multi-service robots. Specifically, we devise a principled approach, named CO-SLEEC (Context-Oriented SLEEC), connecting the normative setting of SLEEC rules to context-oriented programming (COP). CO-SLEEC enables runtime adaptation while preserving the semantics of SLEEC rules during robot task execution. It features two reusable Python libraries for (i) parsing SLEEC rules into contextual elements for operationalising them, and (ii) connecting the operational model to the Robot Operating System (ROS), respectively. We evaluate our implementation for correctness, efficiency, and maintainability over multi-service assistive robot scenarios.