Anticipatory Regulation for Service Robotics Safety

This paper examines the application of anticipatory regulation to service robotics, with personal care robots as a case study. Designed to assist users in non-medical contexts, personal care robots present unique safety and legal challenges and occupy a regulatory gap that existing frameworks for industrial and medical robots fail to address. Traditional regulatory approaches struggle to keep pace with such advancements, leaving developers grappling with abstract and ill-fitting legal provisions to consider for their designs. Anticipatory regulation—a proactive, iterative framework emphasizing inclusivity, adaptability, and outcome-based standards—offers a dynamic solution that could help bridge service robotics regulatory gaps and ensure safer, more accountable robotic systems.