Building Trustworthy Household Robots through Open-World Safety

Abstract:Foundation models are expanding robot capabilities, enabling robots to handle more diverse objects, follow sophisticated instructions, and operate in complex environments. These advances bring us to a future in which robots become part of everyday household life. However, cluttered, dynamic household environments also expose robots to unfamiliar objects, tasks, and interactions, making reliable zero-shot task completion an ongoing challenge for robotics research. From a security perspective, we argue for open-world safety: household robots should preserve specified safety requirements in unseen situations, including when they cannot complete the requested task. Safety protections must account for context and interactions that persist across actions and tasks. In this position paper, we examine why existing safety methods can fail to provide this protection. Protection can fail through misinterpreted context, overlooked past interactions, or stopping and recovery strategies that become unsafe under unfamiliar conditions. We therefore propose a research agenda to specify, learn, and ground safety requirements, enforce them with reliable recovery, and evaluate the generalization of such protections. We call for household robots whose safety protections remain reliable beyond the situations, context, and history used to train and develop them, to achieve open-world safety.

Robotics (cs.RO); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

arXiv:2610.14034 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.14034v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.14034 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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