Robot Coexistence Education
Introductory materials for understanding how robots participate in schools, homes, workplaces, stores, care facilities, and other shared social environments.
Education and public literacy
Human-Robot Coexistence Literacy
Public-facing literacy materials for living, learning, and sharing space with robots.
As robots enter schools, homes, stores, stations, care settings, and other shared environments, people need a practical language for understanding how to interact with them safely and responsibly.
Purpose
From coexistence principles to everyday understanding
The Human-Robot Coexistence Guidelines provide general principles for safety, responsibility, dignity, labor, and shared social space. Coexistence literacy translates those principles into public-facing educational language for children, users, facility staff, and everyday citizens.
The aim is not to turn every person into a robot engineer. It is to help people understand basic roles, safe distances, contact boundaries, responsibility signs, and appropriate behavior when robots are present in human environments.
Read the coexistence guidelinesBasic question
When humans and robots share the same physical and social space, what should ordinary people know before they approach, avoid, touch, interrupt, rely on, or report a robot?
Focus areas
Four public literacy themes
These themes organize public education materials without presenting them as a certification, legal standard, or commercial training service.
Robot Manners
Public-facing language for everyday situations such as approaching a robot, giving it space, not blocking its route, and understanding when human staff should be contacted.
Children's Robot Coexistence Literacy
Child-oriented explanations that help children understand robots as machines in shared spaces while learning basic safety, curiosity, distance, and respect.
Facility and Public-Space Contact Manners
Guidance concepts for stations, stores, hotels, schools, libraries, hospitals, care facilities, event venues, and other places where people encounter service robots.
Public-space examples
Contact manners are part of coexistence
In public and semi-public environments, human behavior around robots can affect safety and trust. People may need to know whether they can touch a robot, whether they should stand aside, how to treat cameras and sensors, and how to report an abnormal stop or unsafe situation.
Coexistence literacy therefore connects technical deployment with ordinary social behavior. It gives language to questions that are often too basic for technical manuals but too important to leave unexplained.
Typical situations
- Children approaching or following a service robot
- Visitors blocking a cleaning or delivery robot's route
- Users touching sensors, cameras, arms, trays, or display panels
- Facility staff explaining what a robot is allowed to do
- People reporting a stopped, damaged, or unsafe robot
Relation to guidelines
A public education layer for the guidelines
The guidelines set out general principles. Literacy materials make those principles easier to use in classrooms, facilities, public spaces, family conversations, and introductory explanations.
This relationship keeps the Institute's structure simple: guidelines remain the principle framework, while coexistence literacy serves as the public education and communication layer.
Positioning
- Guidelines: principle framework
- Literacy: public education layer
- Robot manners: everyday contact language
- Children's literacy: age-appropriate explanation
Institute initiatives
Return to initiatives
Coexistence literacy sits alongside the Human-Robot Coexistence Guidelines and other public-facing initiatives of the Institute.