Queer-inclusive responsible robotics: an ethical framework for accountability, privacy, safety, and representation

Robots are rapidly moving into workplaces, homes, and public spaces, raising urgent ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) for their design, deployment, and governance. These challenges are especially pronounced in human–robot interaction (HRI), where embodied systems can reinforce biases, infringe on privacy, and reproduce exclusionary norms. This paper introduces Queer-Inclusive Responsible Robotics (QIRR), a literature-informed and empirically motivated ethical framework organized around three dimensions: Accountability and Governance, Privacy and Safety, and Representation and Inclusion. Accountability and Governance address responsibilities for identifying and remedying harms arising from heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions. Privacy and Safety focus on protecting users from identity-related risks, including surveillance, inference, and involuntary disclosure. Representation and Inclusion address the design of embodiments, interactions, datasets, and models that avoid erasure and stereotyping. Informed by scholarship on responsible robotics, queer ethics, intersectionality, and inclusive design, as well as prior participatory design research with queer participants on robot companions, QIRR provides recommendations for inclusive interaction, identity-sensitive privacy, representation, and governance across the robotics lifecycle. QIRR positions queer inclusion as essential to responsible robotics and as a lens for addressing broader ELSI concerns involving equity, accountability, safety, and trust.