  Autonomous agents are increasingly being proposed for use in healthcare,
assistive care, education, and other applications governed by complex
human-centric norms. To ensure compliance with these norms, the rules they
induce need to be unambiguously defined, checked for consistency, and used to
verify the agent. In this paper, we introduce a framework for formal
specification, validation and verification of social, legal, ethical,
empathetic and cultural (SLEEC) rules for autonomous agents. Our framework
comprises: (i) a language for specifying SLEEC rules and rule defeaters (that
is, circumstances in which a rule does not apply or an alternative form of the
rule is required); (ii) a formal semantics (defined in the process algebra
tock-CSP) for the language; and (iii) methods for detecting conflicts and
redundancy within a set of rules, and for verifying the compliance of an
autonomous agent with such rules. We show the applicability of our framework
for two autonomous agents from different domains: a firefighter UAV, and an
assistive-dressing robot.
