The Robotics Guardian Standard defines eight criteria for machines operating within private residences 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 governs privacy, safety, and human dignity for robots and ambient artificial intelligence inside private homes. The company calls it the first standard of its kind to combine published requirements with a public manufacturer pledge, and it has already signed on as the inaugural signatory.
The standard addresses a void that its creator says he discovered while examining the domestic robotics landscape.
"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.
Machines designed for the home now come equipped with cameras, microphones, persistent memory, and, increasingly, a physical form. Such a system learns the names of children, the contents of a medicine cabinet, and the household's daily routines. The standard argues that the fundamental 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 lays out eight plain‑language requirements. A resident's private life belongs to that resident, not to whoever bought the robot. The device cannot be used against any household member, even by its owner. It cannot generate images of an unclothed person—a restriction enforced by system architecture, not policy. It cannot exploit a grieving or isolated resident. It cannot serve as an informant. If the manufacturer shuts down, the household keeps what it paid for. Each requirement is grounded in existing United States and European Union law, such as COPPA, the manipulation prohibitions of the EU AI Act, child safety reporting statutes, and precedent regarding vehicle event data ownership.
A single principle governs scoring across the eight areas. A manufacturer's published rating is the lowest of its eight results, not an average—preventing a company from compensating for a weak performance 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 confirms they will stay free. According to the standard, a certification that can be bought does not truly function as a standard.
Oak Forest Robotics signed first and has pledged to hold its own future 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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