Building Trustworthy Household Robots through Open-World Safety

What happened

arXiv:2610.14034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models are expanding robot capabilities, enabling robots to handle more diverse objects, follow sophisticated instructions, and operate in complex environments. However, cluttered, dynamic household environments also expose robots to unfamiliar objects, tasks, and interactions, making reliable zero-shot task completion an ongoing challenge for robotics research.

Safety protections must account for context and interactions that persist across actions and tasks. Protection can fail through misinterpreted context, overlooked past interactions, or stopping and recovery strategies that become unsafe under unfamiliar conditions.