Liability, Ethics, and Culture-Aware Behavior Specification using Rulebooks

Andrea Censi; Konstantin Slutsky; Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn; Dmitry Yershov; Scott Pendleton; James Fu; Emilio Frazzoli

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arXiv · 1902.09355

Liability, Ethics, and Culture-Aware Behavior Specification using Rulebooks

Andrea Censi·Konstantin Slutsky·Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn·Dmitry Yershov·Scott Pendleton·James Fu·Emilio Frazzoli

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Abstract

The behavior of self-driving cars must be compatible with an enormous set of conflicting and ambiguous objectives, from law, from ethics, from the local culture, and so on. This paper describes a new way to conveniently define the desired behavior for autonomous agents, which we use on the self-driving cars developed at nuTonomy. We define a "rulebook" as a pre-ordered set of "rules", each akin to a violation metric on the possible outcomes ("realizations"). The rules are partially ordered by priority. The semantics of a rulebook imposes a pre-order on the set of realizations. We study the compositional properties of the rulebooks, and we derive which operations we can allow on the rulebooks to preserve previously-introduced constraints. While we demonstrate the application of these techniques in the self-driving domain, the methods are domain-independent.

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Andrea Censi, Konstantin Slutsky, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn, Dmitry Yershov, Scott Pendleton, James Fu, Emilio Frazzoli. 2019-02-25. Liability, Ethics, and Culture-Aware Behavior Specification using Rulebooks. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09355

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