Institutional Robotics and Norms in Multi-agent Systems

Institutional Robotics is a new view of an old topic. The idea that robots may be regulated by laws (or norms) was extended by Isaac Asimov’ sci-fi books in the mid of 20th century.

In the 90s, Philosophy Professor John Searle contributed with the idea of Social Reality, i.e. there exist brute facts, as the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, as the score of a football game. Furthermore, he stated that institutional facts are constructed with logical rules of the form “X counts as Y in C”.

With these two notions, we defined brute and institutional events. Whereas brute events are unavoidable and performed by agents, institutional events are the subset of brute events that is considered valid in a given context, namely the institution.

For instance, waiving a hand counts as a greeting in most situations but it may count as a bid in the context of an English Auction.

With these notions, we are able to enforce norms as translations of brute events to institutional ones that cause changes in the context (or institution) where the event was generated.

Then, I propose Institutional Robotics as the enforcement of norms in possibly adversarial teams of robots using the concept of institution in Searle’s sense. To read about a proposal that completely ignores all previous and seminal work in Electronic Institutions, Virtual Organisations, and norms in Multi-agent systems, even when the former is partially published in an agent conference, check here.

In order to explain Institutional Robotics in plain english, I will use the movie “The Matrix”.

Institutional Robotics is to force robots to be in a Matrix controlled by humans and enforced by agents. However, our Matrix will be more human, as they will have a partial view and partial freedom to act (controlled by us) in the real world.

Then, I propose that robots must interact in Controlled Reality, the mix of Augmented Reality and Parental Controls.

(I only hope that a robot like Neo will never exist! )

I’ve designed a robot architecture for Institutional Robotics based on a new type of Electronic Institution that I call Cooperative Electronic Institutions. I’ll explain more on this, if the paper describing this gets published.