Robot-Ready Architecture: A Readiness Framework for Buildings in the Age of Physical & Embodied AI

Every building encodes assumptions about its occupants, and robots break them. Machines that navigate flawlessly in the lab are defeated by glass doors, two-centimeter thresholds, night-lighting regimes, elevators without interfaces, and staff nobody consulted; mismatches between machines and environments never designed to receive them; and where deployment economics quietly die. Three forces now make building readiness an economic question: the transition decade, in which the last 20% of environmental friction stalls pilots; fleet economics, at which the building must adapt to the machines; and application-level compliance, as the 2025 revision of ISO 10218 and the EU Machinery Regulation (from January 2027) move the object of safety assessment from the machine to its environment. This working paper supplies the shared vocabulary: eleven reference definitions, seven readiness domains, five spatial integration strategies (S1–S5), and a six-level readiness scale (RRL 0–5), applied across eight asset-class profiles from logistics and healthcare to residential, data centers, mining, and public space. It positions itself within a decade of robot-inclusive design research while anchoring readiness to deployment decisions, pilot-viability and fleet-viability, and to the human half of cohabitation. The assessment methodology itself is withheld as a working instrument.