Rethinking Safety for Generalist Robots

Abstract:Generalist robots promise to transform our society: the same system that prepares a meal or folds laundry might also repair a car, inspect infrastructure, or care for a loved one. Yet this versatility introduces risks far beyond the collision- and force-based safety notions that have long dominated robotics. Notions of safety must now consider context (e.g., turning off a building's electricity is only safe during scheduled maintenance), user intent (e.g., asking the robot to ``clean the kitchen'' includes unspoken expectations that the robot should not mix dangerous but powerful cleaning agents like bleach and ammonia), hard-to-model physical consequences (e.g., burning food during meal preparation), and more. We argue the need for a new era of robot safety---embodied AI safety---that broadens the hazards considered across the robot's lifecycle while recognizing that the safety of bits cannot be separated from the safety of atoms. We present a taxonomy of emerging risks and a full-stack research agenda to guide the safe deployment of generalist robots.

Systems and Control (eess.SY); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.06326 [eess.SY]

(or arXiv:2609.06326v1 [eess.SY] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.06326 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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