Rethinking Safety for Generalist Robots
1]Stanford University 2]University of California, Los Angeles 3]NVIDIA Research 4]Princeton University 5]Carnegie Mellon University \contribution[*]Corresponding author: abajcsy@cmu.edu. 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 c