Oak Forest Robotics Publishes Open Standard for Privacy and Safety in Home Robots
The Robotics Guardian Standard sets eight requirements for machines that operate inside private homes, and establishes
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The Robotics Guardian Standard sets eight requirements for machines that operate inside private homes, and establishes a free public pledge for manufacturers
NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, July 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Oak Forest Robotics has published The Robotics Guardian Standard, an open conformance framework governing privacy, safety, and human dignity for robots and ambient artificial intelligence operating inside private residences. The company describes it as the first standard of its kind to pair published requirements with a public manufacturer pledge, and has signed it as the first signatory.
The standard responds to a gap its author says he encountered while researching the domestic robotics market.
“I could not believe, while researching this, that not a single company or group of robotics companies had reached a shared conclusion about privacy and safety in products that are going to end up in virtually every modern home,” said Gabriel Dean Roberts, roboticist and founder of Oak Forest Robotics.
Domestic machines now entering homes carry cameras, microphones, persistent memory, and in a growing number of cases a physical body. Such a system learns the names of children, the contents of a medicine cabinet, and the household’s daily patterns. The standard argues that the central question is not whether these machines can perceive, but whom that perception serves. Its motto, Protegere Non Extrahere, translates as “to protect, not to extract.”
The framework sets out eight requirements, written in plain language. A resident’s private life belongs to that resident rather than to whoever purchased the robot. The machine cannot be turned against a member of the household, including by its owner. It cannot produce images of an unclothed person, prevented by system architecture rather than by policy. It cannot manipulate a grieving or isolated resident. It cannot act as an informant. If the manufacturer ceases operations, the household retains what it paid for. Each requirement is anchored in existing United States and European Union law, including COPPA, the manipulation prohibitions of the EU AI Act, child safety reporting statutes, and vehicle event data ownership precedent.
A single principle governs how the eight are scored. A manufacturer’s published rating is the lowest of its eight results rather than an average, preventing a company from offsetting a weak area with a strong one.
Any robotics manufacturer may take the Robotics Guardian Pledge, publish its commitments under its own legal name, and display a seal reading PLEDGED SIGNATORY. The pledge, the public record, and the seal carry no fee, and Roberts states that they will remain free. According to the standard, a certification that can be purchased does not function as a standard.
Oak Forest Robotics signed first and has committed to holding its own forthcoming products to the same requirements.
“We had to do something about this before we ever put our own product into the world,” Roberts said. “That is why we are the first to make the pledge, and we will be the first to make sure our products meet the standard we set for ourselves.”
The First Edition is published by Oak Forest Robotics Press and deposited with a permanent DOI in Zenodo, the open research repository operated by CERN. It is additionally available through SSRN and Academia.edu. The full text and the pledge form are available at oakforest.co/robotics-guardian-standard.
Roberts holds a Master of Interdisciplinary Arts from the University of Washington, studied business through Harvard Business School Online, and completed advanced robotics coursework at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. His photography and painting have appeared in Vogue and VICE and have been exhibited at MoMA PS1.
About Oak Forest Robotics
Oak Forest Robotics is a private robotics company developing sovereign household systems that operate on hardware owned by the resident, without cloud dependency. The company is based in New York and holds a Wyoming charter. Further information is available at oakforest.co.
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