Glossary
Plain-language explanations of the terms used across Laws Of Robots. Each definition links back to the published page that governs the term.
A glossary definition is a reading aid. It does not replace the published Laws, Privacy Commitments, Proof material, or the current Status page.
Core concepts
- Robot Expert System (RES)
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The trust-and-record layer described as running inside an autonomous system.
Read more: Getting Started, About
- Owner
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The person who may add stricter rules above the safety floor; an Owner may not lower that floor.
Read more: Getting Started, The Laws
- The Laws
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The ordered rules that form the fixed safety floor in the public model.
Read more: The Laws, Getting Started
- Safety floor
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The lowest governing boundary that no maker, Owner, or other party may lower.
Read more: Getting Started, Home
- Owner rules
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Additional rules set above the safety floor that may make limits stricter.
Read more: Getting Started, The Laws
- Governed decision
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An act or refusal evaluated against the Laws and Owner rules and accompanied by a recorded reason.
Read more: Getting Started
Evidence and verification
- Decision record
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The tamper-evident, append-only sequence of the machine's decisions.
Read more: Proof, Privacy Commitments
- Tamper-evident
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Designed so that an alteration is detectable through the verification chain rather than silently accepted.
- Append-only
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A record property in which decisions are added as a sequence; it is not described as an editable history.
Read more: Proof, Privacy Commitments
- Verification
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A bounded check that a record is intact and a decision can be re-derived and checked.
Read more: Proof
- Re-derivation
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Checking a recorded decision again from the public record basis, rather than relying only on an assertion about what occurred.
Read more: Proof
- Offline verification
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Verification that the public design says can complete without a network, server, or dashboard.
- Certificate
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The public evidence issued by the named external certifier; it is not a general safety certification.
Privacy and public information
- Bystander
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A person the machine perceives who is not the Owner.
Read more: Privacy Commitments
- Public corpus
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The owner-approved set of published LOR material from which Karel may answer and cite.
Read more: Ask Karel
- Karel
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The public website helper that answers from the approved public corpus, not from Owner accounts or Robot data.
Read more: Ask Karel