The Robotics Guardian Standard outlines eight criteria for machines operating inside private homes and introduces a no-cost public pledge for manufacturers
“This is a way for a robotics company to say in public that it isn't just thinking about the technology… It's thinking about what that machine does to the life of every single person under that roof.”— Gabriel Dean RobertsNEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, July 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Oak Forest Robotics has released The Robotics Guardian Standard, an open conformance framework that addresses privacy, safety, and human dignity for robots and ambient artificial intelligence functioning within private residences. The company notes that this is the first standard of its kind to combine published requirements with a publicly accessible manufacturer pledge, and it has signed the pledge as the first participant.
The standard fills a void that its creator says he discovered while studying the domestic robotics market.
“While researching this, I could not believe that no single company or group of robotics companies had arrived at a shared conclusion about privacy and safety in products that will end up in nearly every modern home,” said Gabriel Dean Roberts, roboticist and founder of Oak Forest Robotics.
Household machines now entering homes are equipped with cameras, microphones, persistent memory, and in a growing number of cases, a physical body. Such a system learns children’s names, the contents of a medicine cabinet, and the household’s daily routines. The standard contends that the core question is not whether these machines can perceive, but who benefits from that perception. Its motto, Protegere Non Extrahere, means “to protect, not to extract.”
The framework establishes eight requirements, written in straightforward language. A resident’s private life belongs to that resident, not to the individual who bought the robot. The machine cannot be used against a household member, even by its owner. It cannot produce images of an unclothed person—this is prevented by system architecture, not by policy. It cannot manipulate a grieving or isolated resident. It cannot serve as an informant. If the manufacturer goes out of business, the household retains what it paid for. Each requirement is grounded 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 compensating for a weak area with a strong one.
Any robotics manufacturer can 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 truly 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 also available through SSRN and Academia.edu. The full text and the pledge form are accessible 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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