Safety & Standards

Operational Design Domain (ODD)

An operational design domain (ODD) is the explicit specification of conditions under which an autonomous system is designed to function safely, covering factors such as environment type, object classes, lighting, speeds, and required infrastructure. The concept was formalized in autonomous driving through SAE J3016 and is increasingly applied to mobile robots and manipulation systems to bound claims of safe operation.

Why it matters for physical AI

Declaring what a robot is not designed to handle is central to safety cases, regulatory approval, and honest evaluation of learned systems whose failure modes are hard to enumerate.

Build physical AI

Put these concepts to work on real hardware

Axol is a dual-arm robot built for physical AI — teleoperate it, collect demonstrations, and deploy learned policies out of the box.