Master Thesis: Who Is Responsible When the Robot Decides?

Join our Team About this opportunity: AI agents can plan and act on behalf of people and organisations, while autonomous robots operate in the physical world. As control is shared among principals, developers, manufacturers, integrators, operators, and supervisors, it can be difficult to establish how responsibility should be traced when something goes wrong.

This thesis will focus on autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) operating in public or semi-public environments. You will examine how identity management, authentication, authorisation, delegation, logging, and traceability can support accountable autonomy.

What you will do

Review relevant research, standards, and regulations. Interview practitioners working in autonomous systems, security, identity management, and compliance. Assess requirements against documented incidents involving autonomous systems. Develop a requirements framework, identify gaps, and propose practical recommendations for accountable autonomy.

The skills you bring: Identify the technical, organisational, and regulatory conditions needed to reconstruct responsibility after an AI-directed AMR causes harm. The project will examine accountability conditions; it will not determine final legal liability.