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Short abstract:

Assessing risks in autonomous systems involves safety assurance approaches focusing on technical aspects. This study applies the SOTEC framework to identify sociotechnical risks in autonomous robot swarm development, offering nuanced and contextual insights beyond technical aspects.

Long abstract:

Assessing the risks of autonomous systems involves the use of safety assurance approaches to analyse system-level safety requirements, such as robustness, fault tolerance, and runtime monitoring (Hawkins et al., 2022). These safety assurance approaches provide safety engineers with a framework to construct their own assurance arguments in order to demonstrate confidence in the safety of their system, particularly to regulatory bodies. So far, safety assurance cases have been related to ‘technical’ practices. However, a continuous focus on technical solutions for the systematic identification, assessment, and mitigation of potential hazards or risks (e.g., Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) has neglected the more complex human and contextual factors that underpin safety. This presentation will discuss the ethnographic findings of autonomous robot swarm development and shed light on the complex human, social, and organisational sources of risk and how they can be systematically identified to help build holistic and nuanced insights that complement the more technical aspects of assurance cases. The study applies Macrae’s (2023) Structural, Organisational, Technological, Epistemic, and Cultural (‘SOTEC’) framework to identify and understand sociotechnical sources of risk in the development, deployment, and operation of an autonomous robot swarm in a public cloakroom. Applying ideas from SOTEC and concepts of autonomy in robotics on the one hand, and in humans, on the other hand, this presentation will discuss how the technology poses unique definitional questions around ‘how safe’ the system should be and whether ‘autonomous’ is a useful term for describing such systems.