Decision and authorization
RES — Governance
Applies the Laws and Owner rules, determines what the robot may and must do, and records why.
Governance software for autonomous robots
Robot Expert System
AI that Answers to You.
The Robot Expert System (RES) is an embodied Trust Layer for Autonomous Systems — a programmable conscience that runs inside the agent, with a safety floor that cannot be overridden and a tamper-evident record of every decision it makes.
The Laws, with the Owner's rules above them, govern what a robot may do — in an order no one can change.
The system
One trustworthy loop
Three distinct responsibilities work together without blurring who decides, who prepares, and who acts.
understanding ⇄ authorization
Belief and preparation
Cognition & Coordination
Maintains what the robot has reason to believe, exposes uncertainty, prepares possibilities, and coordinates work RES has authorized.
evidence ⇄ authorized work
Sensing and actuation
Robot Integration
Connects sensors, navigation, drivers, and physical action through ROS 2, vendor middleware, or simulation adapters.
Cognition enriches RES; it never gates it.
If cognition is absent, late, or stale, RES continues governing with the degradation visible in its record.
What it is
An autonomous agent makes consequential decisions in the world. Its capability can be verified on a bench; its conduct cannot. The tools that try to govern conduct today sit outside the agent, in the cloud, where they can be switched off, bypassed, or simply lost with the connection.
The RES is not ordinary robot software. It is the robot's conscience: the trust-and-record layer that runs on the robot itself.
- Offline and durable. It runs with no network and operates the same on day one and day one thousand.
- Unbypassable below the floor. The owner defines the agent's limits and can make them stricter at any time, but no one — including the owner — can lower the immutable safety floor. There is no in-the-moment override of a refusal.
- Self-recording. Every decision is written to a tamper-evident, append-only record that travels with the agent and can be independently audited later.
- Reproducible. A decision can be re-derived and checked, not merely asserted.
What it is Not
The RES is not a
- Capability or performance layer
- Replacement for a maker's autonomy stack
- Guarantee that any particular decision was wise
It governs and records; it does not make the agent smarter.
Isaac Asimov spent a career showing that unexamined laws fail. This catalog is what examining them looks like.
Current maturity and current claims live on the Status page.
Who checks this?
The RES submits to an independent certifier it does not control: GRRC. Certification is issued by GRRC and by no one else: neither the maker nor the owner can grant it, and a robot cannot certify itself. The separation is enforced cryptographically, so any attempt to self-clear is detectable. Any certificate can be checked from outside, by anyone.
Verify it yourself at grrc.ai →
Karel
Hard questions. Straight answers.
The ones a skeptic would ask, answered without spin.
“Anything can be hacked. Why believe this?”
We never say unhackable. The claim is narrower and checkable: the record cannot be altered silently. Tampering shows as a broken chain to anyone who verifies it.
“Is this real today?”
Yes, at early maturity: one implementation, in owner use, no shipped robot. The Status page says exactly what is true now and what is planned, and it stays honest as that changes.
“Who does it really answer to: you, or me?”
You. The Owner writes the rules and can tighten them at any time. Beneath them sits a safety floor no one can lower: not the maker, not us, not even you.
“What about people's privacy?”
That is answered by a published document, not a promise in passing. The commitments are versioned, public, and binding, and the first of them reads:
The machine's perception of anyone other than the owner does not enter the record.
Read all four commitments, and what they do not claim, in the Privacy Commitments Statement.
Written answers, approved by the owner of this site. Nothing here is a live agent.
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