Term
Legitimacy
The reason a governance body, process, or rule should be recognised as authoritative.
Resources
Terms, links, and orientation
Key concepts and related sites for following the governance dimension of increasingly autonomous robotic systems.
Key terms
A compact vocabulary for reading robot governance as a field of institutional responsibility, deployment design, and public accountability.
Term
Accountability
The structured allocation of answerability when a robotic system acts, errs, or causes downstream effects.
Term
Oversight
The review, audit, challenge, and intervention functions surrounding the deployment of robotic systems.
Term
Liability
The legal and institutional allocation of responsibility when robotic systems cause harm, loss, or downstream effects.
Term
Deployment
The conditions under which robotic systems are introduced into workplaces, homes, infrastructure, or shared public spaces.
Term
Robot Passport
A proposed identity and lifecycle record framework for robotic systems, covering identification, ownership, permissions, deployment, maintenance, incidents, updates, and transfer.
Term
Responsibility chain
The linked set of manufacturers, owners, operators, deployers, maintainers, supervisors, insurers, and public bodies that may share duties around a robot.
Term
Robot identity record
A persistent record that connects a specific robotic system to its ID, model, configuration, manufacturer, and operational status.
Term
Robot lifecycle record
A record of the robot's changes over time, including deployment, maintenance, updates, incidents, transfer, and retirement.
Term
Deployment permission
The institutional approval that defines where a robot may operate, what tasks it may perform, and what safeguards must be present.
Term
Custody
The practical control and day-to-day responsibility held by an owner, operator, facility, lessee, or maintenance organisation.
Term
Operating authority
The recognised permission to start, stop, supervise, update, restrict, or redeploy a robotic system in a given environment.
Term
Robot incident record
A record of accidents, near misses, emergency stops, malfunctions, complaints, unusual behaviour, and corrective actions.
Term
Auditability
The ability to reconstruct what happened, which system was involved, which permissions applied, and who had responsibility at the time.
Term
Public-space deployment
The use of robots in shared environments where affected people may not be direct customers, owners, or trained users.
Term
Human oversight
The institutional capacity for people to monitor, pause, intervene, review, and revise robotic system behaviour.
Term
Governance layer
The institutional layer around a robot that defines authorisation, supervision, recordkeeping, response, and accountability.
Related sites
This site belongs to a wider field-building effort around human-machine relations, rights, labour, and institutions.
Related programs
Adjacent lines of inquiry
Robot Governance focuses on institutions, standards, and accountability. Closely related programs include Robot Rights and Robot Labor.
Program matrix
- Robot Rights — recognition and status
- Robot Governance — institutions and accountability
- Robot Labor — work and coordination