Frequently asked questions

The Robot Expert System, or RES, is described as a trust-and-record layer inside an autonomous system. It applies an ordered safety floor and the Owner's additional rules, then leaves a tamper-evident record of its decision.

Source: Getting Started, About

RES is intended to make a robot's governed decisions understandable and checkable after the fact. It does not present itself as a way to make a robot faster, more capable, or wiser.

Source: Getting Started, About

No. The public description places RES alongside a robot's capability stack as a trust-and-record layer: it governs decisions and records them rather than serving as the robot's general autonomy, planning, or capability software.

Source: Getting Started, About

The public model describes fixed Laws as the safety floor. An Owner may add rules above that floor to make them stricter, but no party may lower the floor.

Source: Getting Started, The Laws

The public case is about trust: as autonomous systems act around people, the important question is not only what they can do, but whether the basis for a decision can later be checked independently.

Source: Home, WP01 — Trust Will Decide the Robot Age — Not Capability

No such claim is made. The published description presents RES as a rule-bound governance and record layer. Karel is the separate public website helper and only answers from approved public LOR information.

Source: Getting Started, About, Ask Karel

RES does not claim to make a robot generally safe, guarantee wise decisions, replace all robot software, or turn a certificate into a safety certification. The Status and Proof pages set the limits of those claims.

Source: Proof, Status, About

No. An Owner may add protections or make rules stricter, but the public description says the ordered safety floor cannot be lowered by the Owner, a maker, or another party.

Source: Getting Started, The Laws, Home

Yes. The Owner's rules sit above the fixed floor and may make the applicable limits stricter. They do not provide a way to bypass a refusal below the floor.

Source: Getting Started, The Laws

No. The public design says judgment runs inside the machine, and no network is required to decide.

Source: Getting Started, Proof

The public design says the record remains verifiable offline. Disconnecting the machine from a network does not make verification depend on a server, dashboard, or the operator's word.

Source: Proof, Security

The Status page is the authoritative current answer. It describes RES as at early product maturity and in owner use; it does not claim a shipped robot or third-party deployment.

Source: Status

Visit the Owners page to choose Existing Owner Sign In or Register as an Owner. Registration requirements, confirmation, and next steps are managed in the RES Owner UI.

Source: Owners, Getting Started, Status

No. Karel's public interface states that it uses approved public website information and cannot access Owner accounts or Robot data.

Source: Ask Karel, Privacy policy

Start with Getting Started to understand what RES is and is not. Then read The Laws for the fixed safety floor, Proof for what can be checked after a decision, and Privacy Commitments for the treatment of Owner and bystander information. Finally, check Status for the product's current maturity and availability.

Source: Getting Started, The Laws, Proof, Privacy Commitments, Status

Use Register as an Owner on the Owners page. The RES Owner UI manages registration requirements, confirmation, and next steps.

Source: Owners, Status

No. The public reading path is educational only. It does not create an Owner account, establish eligibility, pair a robot, or change a robot's behavior.

Source: Owners, Getting Started, Status

The public site does not make a compatibility, installation, or commercial availability claim for a particular robot. Check Status for the current product boundary rather than assuming that an existing robot can be converted or paired.

Source: Status

The public site provides product reading through Getting Started, FAQ, Status, and Privacy Commitments. Account setup, account recovery, robot pairing, initial configuration, support, eligibility, pricing, and Owner data handling are controlled by the RES registration and Owner UI.

Source: Owners, Status

At a public-description level, an instruction is evaluated against the Laws and the Owner's additional rules. The robot acts or refuses, records the decision and reason, and the record can later be checked.

Source: Getting Started, The Laws

The public sources describe it as the tamper-evident, append-only record of the machine's decisions. It is intended to travel with the agent rather than depend on a remote dashboard.

Source: Proof, Privacy Commitments

The public record describes an RES decision record as a tamper-evident, append-only record of the machine's decisions and their stated reasons. It is designed to be verified offline and to support re-derivation of a recorded decision. Laws Of Robots does not describe or assess the contents, reliability, or retention practices of another robot's logs.

Source: Proof, Getting Started

Verification reports the bounded things the record can support: that the record is intact and that a decision can be re-derived and checked.

Source: Proof

It does not certify that a decision was wise, that the robot is generally safe, or more than the record can establish.

Source: Proof, Status

The claim is not that any system is unhackable. The narrower public claim is that an alteration to the record is intended to be detectable as a broken verification chain rather than silently accepted as genuine.

Source: Home, Proof, Security

A reviewer can check what the public verification process is designed to support: whether the record is intact and whether the decision can be re-derived and checked. The process is designed not to depend on a manufacturer server, a dashboard, or a party's say-so. It does not certify that the decision was wise, and it does not state more than the record can carry.

Source: Proof, Security

The public design says the record travels with the agent and verifies offline. Specific reviewer tooling or procedures are only described where the public Proof material says they are available.

Source: Proof

No. The public site does not present the RES certificate as certification of a robot, the complete Laws Of Robots System, or general safety. The registry and Status page define the narrower claim that can actually be checked.

Source: Status

The Privacy Commitments define a bystander as someone the machine perceives who is not the Owner. The public commitment says bystander information has no passive or automatic route into the record; admission requires an explicit, attributed act and a reason for accountability.

Source: Privacy Commitments

The public Privacy Commitments present them as complements:

A person's information can be destroyed on request, but the tamper-evident record of what the machine did cannot be altered or erased by anyone, including the owner.

Source: Privacy Commitments

The Privacy Policy is the source of record for this website. It explains the site's use of same-site assets and its no-advertising/no-third-party-analytics posture, alongside the separate treatment of a message sent to a published contact address.

Source: Privacy policy

No. The current Privacy Policy states that the application does not add content logging of Karel questions or answers, and that its model request is configured as stateless. Standard Azure service and security logs may still be kept under Microsoft's terms.

Source: Privacy policy

Karel uses an approved public LOR corpus and links the public sources behind its response. The linked source, rather than Karel's wording, remains the authoritative wording.

Source: Ask Karel, Privacy policy

Do not enter personal, confidential, Owner, or Robot information. Karel is not a legal adviser, certifier, emergency service, or a source for safety-critical decisions.

Source: Ask Karel, Privacy policy

GRRC is the external certifier for the published RES certification. It remains outside the Laws Of Robots product chain; its role does not make it the certifier of RQR, Robot Integration, Scenario Lab, Extensibility, or the complete System.

Source: Home, About, Proof

Not for the RES certificate described here. The public sources say that certification is issued by GRRC, not by the maker, Owner, robot, or Laws Of Robots operator. The stated purpose is to prevent self-certification from being treated as independent assurance.

Source: Home, Proof, About

The public pages describe the RES certificate in GRRC's registry and offline verification of an RES decision record. They also publish component-level Status so readers can distinguish current RES claims from work that is in development or planned.

Source: Home, Proof, Status

No such claim is made. The Status page says there is one operator and no third-party use is claimed.

Source: Status

No. RES is described as the layer that governs and records decisions from the robot's capability stack. It is not positioned as a general replacement for the robot's autonomy, planning, or capability software.

Source: Getting Started, About

The Laws form the ordered safety floor. Owner rules are additional constraints above that floor and may tighten it; they do not lower or reorder it.

Source: Getting Started, The Laws

The public materials describe an offline-verifiable record and a bounded verification result. They do not promise a proprietary interface, API, service-level agreement, or a particular reviewer workflow.

Source: Proof, Status

No. The public pages describe auditable reasoning and record integrity. They do not claim a premium reduction, a particular legal result, lower incident probability, or a general finding of insurability.

Source: Proof, Status, WP01 — Trust Will Decide the Robot Age — Not Capability

WP01, Trust Will Decide the Robot Age — Not Capability, is the public starting paper. It frames trust—not capability—as the gating issue and points to why the party that needs to be trusted cannot simply certify itself.

Source: WP01 — Trust Will Decide the Robot Age — Not Capability, Papers

The public architecture separates RES governance, RQR, and Robot Integration. Scenario Lab now provides a deterministic public replay of those boundaries, while Extensibility describes future specialist modules. Each part has a named job and an explicit authority boundary.

Source: System Overview

No. It may maintain evidence-based beliefs, expose uncertainty, and prepare or coordinate candidate work, but RES alone determines permission and obligation. RQR enriches RES; it never becomes a second governance engine or a prerequisite for RES to continue governing.

Source: System Overview, RES — Governance, RQR

No. Robot Integration is the adapter boundary to sensors, navigation, drivers, middleware, simulation, and eventual physical actuation. It carries authorized goals and returns evidence; it does not decide whether consequential work is permitted.

Source: System Overview, Robot Integration

No. The public Scenario Lab is a curated, deterministic replay using named TRES and RobotSim versions and conditions. It does not expose unrestricted scenario submission, a live development system, or physical actuation.

Source: Scenario Lab, Status