Safety & Standards

Functional Safety

Functional safety is the discipline of ensuring that a system's safety-related functions perform correctly in response to faults and hazardous conditions, reducing risk to acceptable levels through measures like redundant sensing, safe-state transitions, and monitored stop functions. It is governed by standards including IEC 61508, ISO 13849 for machinery control, and in robotics ISO 10218 and the ISO/TS 15066 guidance for collaborative operation, with safety integrity quantified by levels such as SIL and PL.

Why it matters for physical AI

Certifying learned, non-deterministic policies against safety standards is an open challenge; today's deployments wrap neural controllers in certified supervisory layers, making functional safety architecture a gating factor for robots near people.