A serious safety incident is an existential risk, not a PR problem
It's tempting, especially for a team focused on shipping, to treat safety and certification as red tape standing between a working prototype and a product launch. That framing misses something real: a single serious safety incident involving a deployed robot can end a robotics company's ability to operate at all, through liability, through loss of customer trust, through regulatory scrutiny that follows an incident, or through some combination of all three. Unlike a software company that can patch a bug and apologize, a robotics company whose product injures someone faces consequences that often aren't fully recoverable, both for the people affected and, in a very direct business sense, for the company itself.
That makes safety engineering a genuine competitive concern, not just a compliance cost. Companies that treat safety and risk assessment as a core part of the engineering process, rather than a box to check right before shipping, tend to build products that are more trustworthy to customers and insurers, move through certification with fewer late-stage surprises, and are less exposed to the kind of catastrophic single incident that can end a company overnight. Safety engineering done well is closer to a moat than an overhead cost, precisely because it's genuinely hard to retrofit onto a design that wasn't built with it in mind from the start.