Health and Safety in AI and Robotics Labs: 8 Risks Offices Miss
Most artificial intelligence companies started as software businesses, and their health and safety arrangements still reflect that. There is a risk assessment covering desks, screens, kitchens and fire evacuation, produced when everyone worked on a laptop, and it is broadly adequate for the floor it was written about.
Then the company built a hardware team. Now there is a room with a robot arm in it, a bench covered in battery packs on charge, a resin printer running overnight, and a test rig somebody assembled from parts. That room is a different regulatory environment from the open-plan floor forty feet away, and in most organisations it has never been assessed as one.
This is not a niche problem any more. Robotics, autonomous systems, custom silicon and physical AI have pulled a large number of software companies into hardware, usually faster than their compliance function moved. Eight things typically sit outside the office assessment.
1. Everything in the lab is work equipment
The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, PUWER, apply to equipment provided for use at work. That captures the robot arm, the CNC mill, the laser cutter, the bench press, the test rig and the equipment your own team designed and built last quarter.
The duties are unglamorous and specific: equipment suitable for its intended use, maintained in efficient working order, inspected where safety depends on installation conditions, and used only by people who have received adequate training. Self-built rigs are the recurring gap, because nobody bought them, so nobody logged them, so they appear in no inventory and no maintenance schedule.
Start with an equipment register. Most labs cannot produce one, and everything else depends on it.
2. Buying a collaborative robot does not give you a collaborative cell
The most expensive misconception in the field. Teams buy a cobot on the understanding that it is inherently safe to work alongside, remove the fencing they would otherwise have installed, and treat the safety question as solved by procurement.
The revised robot safety standards published in 2025, ISO 10218-1 and ISO 10218-2, make the position explicit: collaborative operation is a property of the application, not of the robot. Part 1 addresses the robot itself and is largely a manufacturer concern. Part 2 governs the application and the cell, which means layout, safeguarding, the end effector, the workpiece and verification at cell level. A cobot carrying a sharp tool at speed in a cramped corner is not a collaborative application whatever the datasheet says.
Whoever integrates the cell carries the risk assessment for it, and in an AI company that is usually an engineer with no safety background and no brief to do it.
3. Your software update can make you the manufacturer
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The item most specific to AI businesses, and the one with the longest tail.
Under the EU framework, substantially modifying machinery in a way that introduces a new hazard or increases risk beyond what the original protective measures control transfers manufacturer duties to whoever made the modification. Critically, that includes digital changes, not only physical ones. Raising a speed limit, increasing payload, or shipping a behaviour-changing model update to a deployed robot are all candidates.
For a company whose entire operating model is iterating on the policy running the machine, this is a structural issue rather than an occasional one. The question to answer internally is which changes get a safety review before deployment and who signs them off, and the honest answer in most organisations today is none and nobody.
4. Battery charging, storage and damaged cells
Lithium-ion is where lab fires start. Charging benches with no thermal separation, cells stored in the same room they are tested in, damaged or swollen packs kept "to look at later", and prototype packs assembled in-house without a management regime.
Where flammable or explosive atmospheres can arise, the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations apply, and HSE guidance on DSEAR is the starting point. Beyond the regulations, the practical controls are mundane: designated charging areas, quantity limits, thermal separation, a quarantine procedure for damaged cells, and a fire strategy that accounts for the fact that a lithium fire behaves differently from a paper fire and that your standard extinguishers may not be the right ones.
5. High voltage on the bench
Prototype battery packs and power electronics routinely run at voltages that would be treated with formality anywhere else and are treated casually on a development bench.
The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 require that no person is engaged in work activity where technical knowledge or experience is necessary unless they possess it or are adequately supervised. Live working is permitted only where it is unreasonable for the conductor to be dead, and where suitable precautions are taken. A doctorate in machine learning is not technical knowledge of electrical work, and the distinction matters because the person most likely to be at the bench at 9pm is the person who understands the model rather than the power system.
6. Optical and laser hazards
Lidar development, optical alignment and laser processing all bring beam hazards, and the exposure usually occurs during maintenance rather than operation. An enclosed system is safe while enclosed. The risk arrives when someone defeats the interlock to align something, which is precisely the moment nobody is wearing eyewear.
Classification, a named laser safety responsible person, controlled access, and a written procedure for work with interlocks defeated are the baseline. This is one of the areas where a generalist safety adviser will not be sufficient and specialist input is warranted.
7. Chemicals, resins and printer emissions
Isopropyl alcohol in quantity, photopolymer resins, solvents, adhesives, etchants and cleaning agents accumulate in hardware labs without anyone maintaining an inventory. The COSHH regime requires assessment of substances hazardous to health, and HSE's COSHH guidance sets out what adequate control means in practice.
Additive manufacturing deserves separate mention. Fused filament and resin printers emit ultrafine particles and volatile organic compounds, and they are frequently sited in small unventilated rooms because they are quiet and nobody thought of them as process equipment. Ventilation is the control, and it is rarely designed in.
8. The lab at 2am
Overnight test runs, unattended prints, and one researcher alone with a machine that moves. Most of the controls above assume somebody is there to notice a problem.
Rather than repeat ground covered elsewhere, the arrangements worth having are an out-of-hours protocol, a check-in mechanism, restrictions on which activities may be performed alone, and clarity on what happens when an unattended process fails at 3am. Our post on lone working in tech and AI covers the wider question in more detail.
The lab assessment checklist
| Area | The question to answer | Common finding | |---|---|---| | Equipment register | Can you list every item of work equipment, including self-built? | No register exists | | Robot cells | Who assessed the application, not the robot? | Nobody, procurement was treated as the control | | Change control | Which software changes get a safety review before deployment? | None defined | | Batteries | Designated charging area, quantity limits, damaged cell quarantine? | Charging on a shared bench | | Electrical | Who is competent for the voltages present, and is live working justified? | Competence assumed from seniority | | Optical | Classification, responsible person, interlock defeat procedure? | Controls exist in operation, not in maintenance | | Substances | Current inventory and COSHH assessments, including printers? | Inventory incomplete, printers omitted | | Out of hours | What may be done alone, and what happens when it fails? | Undefined |
If more than half of these have no owner, the issue is not that the lab is unsafe today. It is that safety currently depends on the individual judgement of the engineers in the room, which works until one of them leaves or the team doubles.
The 2027 question
Worth raising with your hardware leadership now. Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 replaces the existing EU machinery regime and applies from 20 January 2027, with no transitional period during which both apply. EU-OSHA's summary of the machinery regulation is a useful orientation. It deliberately extends to autonomous mobile machinery, connected equipment and systems where AI performs safety functions, which is the direction most robotics development is travelling.
Two consequences follow. If you place machinery on the EU market, conformity work has a fixed deadline. And if you modify machinery you use, the substantial modification question in point three becomes considerably more prominent. Great Britain has retained its own regime and its own marking, so groups operating on both sides need to track two frameworks rather than assume alignment.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite assesses the environments technology companies actually operate, including the hardware spaces that grew out of a software business. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work across AI and data, IT and software and engineering businesses, which means the assessment covers the open-plan floor and the robot cell to the same standard rather than treating one as an afterthought.
Where a lab sits in one country and the group sits in several, our global health and safety consultants keep the arrangements consistent, and our international health and safety consultants confirm what each jurisdiction requires. A single register of equipment, assessments and actions across every site is where health and safety consultants and software work better together, and periodic health and safety audits confirm the controls survived the last six months of iteration.
If your hardware team has outgrown the risk assessment written for the office, a free gap analysis will tell you what is missing before an incident does.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
