Safety & Standards

Safety Layer

A safety layer is a runtime module that sits between a controller or learned policy and the robot's actuators, filtering or overriding commands that would violate safety constraints. Implementations include control barrier function-based quadratic program filters, action shielding, velocity scaling near humans, and hard emergency-stop logic. The layer is typically designed and verified independently of the policy it supervises, so guarantees hold regardless of policy behavior.

Why it matters for physical AI

Wrapping an unverifiable neural policy in a verifiable safety filter is the dominant pattern for deploying robot foundation models on real hardware without certifying the model itself.