48 n HUMANOID ROBOTICS September 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com The safety question that humanoids need to answer Nvidia recently announced Halos for Robotics, which it describes as the industry’s first full-stack safety system for physical AI. The system brings the company’s autonomous vehicle safety work into the world of robots, spanning computers, sensors, software and a new inspection lab to help partners prepare for third-party certification. Agility Robotics is the first to build Nvidia Halos for Robotics into its humanoid robot, Digit. This is good news, and I want to say so plainly. Safety has long been the least glamorous corner of robotics. It appeals to engineers and standards committees, not to the people who make the videos of robots dancing and running half marathons. So, when one of the most influential companies in computing puts its weight behind robot safety, and when a leading humanoid maker submits its system for independent scrutiny, the whole field benefits. Investment in safety is investment in trust, and consumer confidence is critical if businesses are to continue to benefit from automation. It’s worth looking closely at what this wave of work addresses – and what it does not. A perception problem, well-funded Most of the safety effort around humanoids, including much of the new tooling, concentrates on perception. The hard questions are framed as “can the robot detect a person, predict where they are going, and avoid a collision?” Nvidia’s approach includes an “outside-in” method that uses external cameras and AI agents to watch the workspace and adjust how the robot behaves. That is difficult, but crucial, engineering. However, perception-based collision avoidance rests on an assumption that the robot remains in control of itself. The discipline of functional safety is built on the opposite instinct. A risk assessment spends less time on how a machine behaves when everything works, and more on how it behaves when something breaks. The central question is what the robot does the moment a part fails. In the case of humanoids, the answer is uncomfortable. A legged humanoid is dynamically unstable. It stays upright only by continuously sensing its own balance and correcting, many times a second. Take that control away and it falls, rather than pausing in place. Picture a humanoid mid-stride when an actuator in one leg fails. The machine is already committed to a step it can no longer complete, and it topples, potentially onto whoever is nearby. Given the mass of these robots and their high centre of gravity, the potential consequences are serious. A flawless perception system is no help here – the robot might know where people are but will be unable to avoid them. By the time the fault occurs, the robot has lost the very control that perception was meant to inform. My colleague and leading robotics safety expert, Roberta Nelson Shea, makes a related point about power: a battery fault can disable every actuator and sensor at once, and a What happens when a component in a humanoid robot fails when it is operating in a real-world environment? Dr David Brandt, vice-president of R&D and CTO at Teradyne Robotics, argues that the real test for humanoids isn't just how well they work, but how safely they respond when something goes wrong. Agility Robotics is building Nvidia’s Halos for Robotics safety system for physical AI into its Digit humanoids
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