The International Standards Organization (ISO) is updating its 12-year-old safety requirements for personal care robots. A lot has happened since the last revision, both on the technology side and with researcher’s understanding of safety for humans collaborating with domestic robots. The proposed ISO update addresses hazard identification, risk assessment, and different use scenarios. It does not, however, set limits, propose testing methods, or have enforcement mechanisms that might address the complexities of human-robot collaboration. And that is a problem, argues technology policy researcher Jae-Seong Lee of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejoeon, South Korea.
IEEE Spectrum: Why is the next revision of ISO 13482 a big deal?
Jae-Seong Lee: The standard is moving into final approval at a moment when domestic humanoid robot makers are shifting from lab prototypes to products aimed at real homes, real caregivers, and real families. That matters because the standard does more than specify geometry and impact limits: it helps define what counts as acceptable robot behavior in the messy world of everyday life.
What is the core engineering problem?
Lee: It is not simply whether a robot can avoid collisions or detect people in its path. The harder problem is that human-robot interaction is bidirectional. The robot changes what the human does, and the human changes what the robot perceives and does next. In other words, safety is not a fixed property of the machine alone; it emerges from the relationship.
Isn’t that already covered by current safety standards?
Lee: Only partially. ISO 13482 addresses personal care robots through hazard identification, risk assessment, and intended use scenarios, and related guidance acknowledges non-contact hazards such as unpredictability and incorrect autonomous decisions. But it stops short of binding compliance criteria, test methods, or enforcement mechanisms for the hazards produced by the human-robot relationship.
The technical community understands bidirectional coupling, and the standards framework acknowledges relevant hazards, but no current standard fully converts that knowledge into enforceable rules for domestic autonomy.—Jae-Seong Lee
Why can’t engineers just better define a robot’s operating envelope?
Lee: Because the value proposition of a domestic humanoid depends on operating in uncontrolled environments. A robot that is safe only in standardized rooms, with healthy adults, under well-defined conditions is not really a domestic humanoid at all.
In industrial robotics, designers can usually bound the task, the workspace, and the population. In a home, the robot must adapt to elderly residents, children, visitors, pets, clutter, tight spaces, and fluctuating human behavior. Those aren’t edge cases. Those are the baseline. Tightening the domain to be more like that of factory robots would make the home robots less useful.
The proposal mentions training data. Why does that matter?
Lee: Because the data already reflect the diversity of domestic life. Companies building humanoid training datasets are reportedly sending paying contract workers around the world to record their chores in ordinary settings. That means the robots will be trained on real-world variability, not sanitized demonstrations. The safety problem is therefore in the composition of the entire human-robot system, not in any one component.
What is the standards gap?
Lee: The gap is governance. The technical community understands bidirectional coupling, and the standards framework acknowledges relevant hazards, but no current standard fully converts that knowledge into enforceable rules for domestic autonomy. What is missing is a way to specify safe behavior across the full range of human conditions the robot will actually encounter.
What’s also missing is a decision about who gets to decide whose behavior counts as normal. Whose gait sets the baseline? Whose is an acceptable risk threshold? Whose definition of safe judgment gets written into the requirement language? Those are value judgments, not purely engineering ones. A standards committee cannot avoid choosing a normative reference point; it can only decide whether that choice is explicit and inclusive.
Who could help answer those questions?
Lee: The proposal argues that the people most affected by domestic humanoids are not systematically represented in the working groups shaping the standard. It points especially to older adults, who are often the primary intended users of domestic care robots, yet whose movement patterns and cognitive states are not directly embedded in the standards process.
In other words, this revision acknowledges the hardest problems but pushes unresolved issues into advisory language, non-binding guidance, or future revision scopes. That can be useful, but it also delays the real question: what counts as safe relational behavior in the home?
What are the stakes?
Lee: The risk is not only injury, though that is the obvious concern. The deeper risk is that safety assumptions get baked into products and standards before the market, regulators, and users have a chance to question them. Once deployment patterns harden, it becomes much harder to revise the baseline.
What should the engineers on the standards bodies do about it?
Lee: The engineers on the standards body should ask not just, “What are the robot’s outputs, and do they stay within safe thresholds?” but “What states does this robot engage with, and does that engagement remain safe across the full range of those states?” That shift sounds subtle, but it changes the design brief. It moves safety from machine-centric measurement toward system-level relational assurance.
Domestic humanoid safety cannot be solved by machine engineering alone. It requires a framework that treats the human not as background noise, but as part of the system, part of the definition of the safety envelope.
The post “Home Robot Safety Is All About Relationships” by Lucas Laursen was published on 05/19/2026 by spectrum.ieee.org