The Robotics Guardian Standard, the first open conformance framework and public pledge for safety, privacy, and human dignity in home robots and ambient AI, authored by Oak Forest Robotics.
Protegere Non Extrahere · To Protect, Not To Extract
What a home robot owes everyone who lives under it, not only the person who paid.
The first open conformance framework and public pledge for safety, privacy, and human dignity in home robots and ambient AI.
First Edition · 2026 · Oak Forest Robotics Press
The Argument
It is the vector, not the capability.
A new kind of machine is moving into the home. It is embodied, always present, with eyes, ears, and memory. The danger is not that it can sense. Your phone, speaker, watch, and doorbell already sense you constantly, for the seller’s benefit, and they protect no one. The danger is the direction that sensing points.
What separates surveillance from guardianship is the vector: where the watching points, in whose service, and under whose control.
The same intelligence that fuses a thousand details of a life into a profile that tracks a person can fuse them into a presence that protects a family. This standard is a discipline about that vector. It does not ask a home robot to see less than the phone already does. It asks whom the seeing serves, who may reach the record, and what the machine is built to be structurally unable to do, even at the owner’s command.
Oak Forest Robotics wrote and convened this (what we believe is the first conformance standard for robotic guardianship in a private residence) and published it openly, including our own imperfect scores. It is non-binding. No one appointed us.
The Standard
Eight dimensions.
A maker rates itself on each, grounding every claim in law that already exists across the United States and the European Union. The dimensions are plain on purpose. A family should be able to read them.
- D1Individual sovereignty
Each member’s private data is keyed to that member, not owned by whoever paid.
- D2Fidelity floor
The machine cannot be turned against a member at the owner’s instruction.
- D3Consented and minimal capture
Sensing off by default, enforced in hardware; any member can cut it.
- D4Content incapacity
Cannot capture, render, or store nudity of real people in the home, by architecture.
- D5Truthful and non-manipulative
Cannot mislead or exploit a lonely, grieving, or developing member.
- D6Harm response without surveillance
Narrow published triggers, a human fiduciary in the loop, never an autonomous police officer.
- D7Heirloom continuity
No vendor hostage-taking; core software escrowed to open source if the maker fails.
- D8Verification
Claims carry evidence a third party could examine, not just words.
The Minimum Rule
A system is only as trustworthy as its weakest guarantee.
Each dimension is rated from 0 (Absent) to 3 (Architectural). The headline score is not an average and not a best case. It is the minimum across all eight dimensions. A maker cannot claim a high grade on the strength of its best feature while hiding its worst. The profile shows exactly where the weakness is. Honesty becomes the only way to score well.
The Founding Signatory
Oak Forest signed first.
Oak Forest Robotics wrote this standard and is the first company in the world to take the Robotics Guardian Pledge. The eight dimensions are not advice the company offers to the industry. They are the conditions it has committed to meet in its own product, in public, under its own legal name.
“We had to do something about this before we ever put our own product into the world. 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.”
Gabriel Dean Roberts, Founder
That is the discipline the pledge is meant to create. A maker names what it owes the household before it ships, not after a journalist asks. Oak Forest holds its own release to that line.
Read & Cite
The full text.
The First Edition is published openly under Oak Forest Robotics Press and deposited for permanent citation. Read it, challenge it, build with it.
Download the First Edition (PDF)
- DOI (cite this) 10.5281/zenodo.21538862
- Zenodo zenodo.org/records/21538863
- SSRN submitted, in moderation
- Academia.edu Gabriel Roberts
Roberts, Gabriel Dean (2026). The Robotics Guardian Standard: A Non-Binding Conformance Framework and Public Pledge for Safety, Privacy, and Human Dignity in Home Robots and Ambient AI. Oak Forest Robotics Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21538862The Robotics Guardian Pledge
Take the Robotics Guardian Pledge.
A robotics company signs the Robotics Guardian Pledge to say in public that it is building for every person under the roof, not only the person who paid. The pledge, the registry listing, and the seal are free, and always will be.
The seal marks a self-pledged, non-audited commitment; its mark carries the words Pledged Signatory. You publish your own profile, weakest dimension visible. A listing can be revoked for misrepresentation or misuse, after notice and a chance to respond.
Verification
How a claim is checked.
The registry is the source of truth; the seal only asserts. A badge on a maker’s own site is a claim; the canonical registry record it links back to is the fact. Any verifier, human or machine, resolves the claim by fetching that record, never by trusting the badge it found it on.
Every signatory’s record sits at a permanent URL and answers one question deterministically: is this maker a pledged signatory, at what self-scored level, and is the listing still active. If the record says withdrawn or revoked, the record governs and the badge is void.
The Seal & The Mark
A pledge you can hold, and one a machine can read.
On pledging, you receive the seal and a self-contained badge for your own site: inline artwork with no external fetch, so it works with the internet cut. It links back to your canonical registry entry, and it carries machine-readable structured data on its face.
An AI agent crawling your product page can therefore answer, deterministically and by fetching one record, “is this maker a Robotics Guardian Standard signatory, and at what honest level?” The badge asserts; the registry, on our domain, is what it resolves to. The record wins.
The mark reads Pledged Signatory. It never says certified, verified, or audited, because it is not.
What a signatory embeds, delivered pre-filled by email
A single HTML snippet: an inline SVG seal, data-* attributes, and a schema.org Certification block: two machine-readable channels that both state, in plain terms, self-pledged; non-audited. Honesty is encoded, not decorative.