Safety Third: Autonomous Revolution

Weihan Wang, Director at NexCOBOT, a NEXCOM International company, joins Erik Reynolds to talk about the hardware underneath robot safety. Weihan leads business development, product development, and functional safety for the robotics division and is the safety manager for the SCB 100.
They cover how a motion controller, a PLC, and a safety controller differ, and what makes a safety rated PC a different product from a regular one. Weihan shares how NexCOBOT spent 4 years taking the SCB 100 through SIL 2 and PL d Category 3 certification. He also explains why force monitoring pushes robot makers away from safety PLCs and toward C and C++ on a PC platform, and how customers run redundant safety applications on 2 cores inside a single chip.
The conversation then turns to humanoids, quadrupeds, and ISO 25785, which the ISO working group expects to publish around 2028. Weihan also describes the safety platform NexCOBOT is building on NVIDIA IGX Thor, where a safety island monitors the AI inference and a separate safety MCU serves as the backup.
R&M and NexCOBOT are sharing a booth at NVIDIA GTC Berlin on October 20–22. Stop by to meet both teams.

More on NexCOBOT: https://www.nexcobot.com/
Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

Dr. Daniel Simon joins Erik on the podcast to talk about why the structure of safety critical software decides how safely it can be built and changed. Daniel is Distinguished Solutions Engineer at Qt Group, a member of the R&M Safety Partner Ecosystem. He co-originated Axivion Architecture Verification out of research at the University of Stuttgart and stayed with the work after Qt Group acquired Axivion.
They cover what architecture verification checks, and why documented architectures go stale a few years into a project. Daniel explains why moving compute intensive code from CPU to GPU is an architectural exercise rather than a refactor. He also walks through the Axivion work on CUDA, including the collaboration with NVIDIA on their safety coding rules. The conversation ends on AI generated code and what it does to the person who has to sign off on it.
Daniel is also speaking at the R&M Physical AI & Safety Summit on October 13 in Boston at MassRobotics, where he will cover why deterministic verification and emerging AI trust methods under IEC 61508 and ISO/IEC 22440 have to coexist as robotics teams pursue certification. The Summit is free to attend, and an evening reception at Qt Group follows. The next 2 days at MassRobotics, Reynolds & Moore is running Understanding ISO/IEC TS 22440, a training in collaboration with SafetyCert.AI.
Register for the Summit: https://wkf.ms/4cdJRlF
Register for the 2-Day Training: https://wkf.ms/4gBG3Mj

More on Qt Group: https://www.qt.io/
Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

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/