Safety Third: Autonomous Revolution

Chris Soranno, Manager of International Safety Standards at SICK Sensor Intelligence, joins Erik to take on a complaint the industry makes constantly, that safety standards are always behind the technology. Chris has spent 25 years inside that process. A technology has to prove it is not a passing trend before a committee will invest the effort, and by the time the first meeting happens, the market has already moved again.
His argument is that a standard should say what has to be achieved, never how to achieve it. Chris points to the safety laser scanner, a proven technology that had nowhere to be applied because the application standards of the day named the light curtain as the only accepted answer.
They also cover why risk assessment still holds up for machines whose behavior is harder to predict, why motion and contact are no longer treated as automatically hazardous, and what changes when the thing defeating your safeguard is an adversary rather than an accident.

More on SICK Sensor Intelligence: https://www.sick.com/
Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

Erik talks with Lorenzo Nava, European Managing Director of Reynolds and Moore, about the new regulatory landscape facing intelligent machines in Europe. They look at how the Machinery Regulation, the Cyber Resilience Act, and the AI Act overlap, and what that means for manufacturers trying to bring AI-driven machinery to the European market.
Lorenzo explains the shift from prescriptive standards toward more flexible, framework-based ones, and why defining a clear operational design domain matters when certifying complex systems like humanoids. They discuss the current state of machine learning certification, the standards still in development, and whether notified bodies are ready to sign off on these technologies.
The conversation also covers market surveillance obligations across physical, cyber, and AI systems, and the tensions that arise when requirements to record events run up against European privacy rules.

Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com

This week, Erik Reynolds talks with Kevin Reese, Distinguished Robotics Safety Engineer at Agility Robotics and project leader for ISO 25785-1, the first safety standard for dynamically stable industrial mobile robots. They discuss why classical machine safety assumptions break down for legged robots, where a standard stop can be the most hazardous event, and how the new DSIMR standard fits alongside existing robot and industrial truck standards.
Kevin shares how Agility is expanding Digit's capabilities intentionally, starting with cooperative operation in industrial settings before taking on harder problems like collaborative work and unstructured environments. They also talk about the role of AI in safe human detection, what ISO/IEC TS 22440 means for using AI in safety functions, and what 65,000 operating hours across nine customer deployments has taught the team that the lab never could.

Check out Agility Robotics: https://www.agilityrobotics.com/
Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

Erik Reynolds sits down with Russell Nickerson, Partnership Engagement Liaison at MassRobotics, the world's largest independent nonprofit robotics hub, and founder of Collabots, an entertainment robotics consultancy with clients including Cirque du Soleil.
Russell shares what he sees every day working with startups, corporate partners, and academia: the gap between a robot that works in the lab and one that survives the real world. They dig into UX failures, E-stop recovery on a live stage, why demo day is when robots find new ways to fail, and the overlooked infrastructure problem nobody is talking about, the shortage of integrators and repair shops that can keep robots running long after deployment.
They close on what separates the startups that reach deployment from the ones that don't, and why Russell believes the answer has less to do with the robot and more to do with the customer.

Join Reynolds & Moore at MassRobotics in Boston this October:
R&M Physical AI & Safety Summit, October 13, 1:00-5:00 PM EDT. Free to attend. Register here.
Understanding ISO/IEC TS 22440: Artificial Intelligence – Functional Safety and AI Systems, a two-day in-person training in partnership with RMAI, October 14-15. Seats are limited. Register here.

Check out MassRobotics: https://www.massrobotics.org/
Check out Collabots: https://collabots.net/
Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com

Phillip Hansel, CEO and Co-founder of AIOps, joins Erik Reynolds to talk about what happens when reinforcement learning shows up on the factory floor. Phillip spent more than a decade as a control systems engineer in oil, gas, and chemical processing, and now builds AI for the same kind of plants he once worked in.
They cover the virtual operator, an AI agent trained to run a process the way a seasoned human would. They get into why shaping that agent's behavior makes the modern controls engineer as much psychologist as engineer.
The conversation also gets into the plants where these agents already run, a 20-year control problem one of them quietly solved, and why Phillip is adamant this technology exists to back up human operators rather than replace them.

More on ⁠AIOps: https://ai-ops.com/
More on Reynolds & Moore: https://reynolds-moore.com/