Safety Third: Autonomous Revolution

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.

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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/
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Erik Reynolds sits down with Russell Nickerson, Partnership Engagement Liaison at MassRobotics, the world's largest independent nonprofit robotics hub, and founder of Collabots, an entertainment robotics consultancy with clients including Cirque du Soleil.
Russell shares what he sees every day working with startups, corporate partners, and academia: the gap between a robot that works in the lab and one that survives the real world. They dig into UX failures, E-stop recovery on a live stage, why demo day is when robots find new ways to fail, and the overlooked infrastructure problem nobody is talking about, the shortage of integrators and repair shops that can keep robots running long after deployment.
They close on what separates the startups that reach deployment from the ones that don't, and why Russell believes the answer has less to do with the robot and more to do with the customer.

Join Reynolds & Moore at MassRobotics in Boston this October:
R&M Physical AI & Safety Summit, October 13, 1:00-5:00 PM EDT. Free to attend. Register here.
Understanding ISO/IEC TS 22440: Artificial Intelligence – Functional Safety and AI Systems, a two-day in-person training in partnership with RMAI, October 14-15. Seats are limited. Register here.

Check out MassRobotics: https://www.massrobotics.org/
Check out Collabots: https://collabots.net/
Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com

Phillip Hansel, CEO and Co-founder of AIOps, joins Erik Reynolds to talk about what happens when reinforcement learning shows up on the factory floor. Phillip spent more than a decade as a control systems engineer in oil, gas, and chemical processing, and now builds AI for the same kind of plants he once worked in.
They cover the virtual operator, an AI agent trained to run a process the way a seasoned human would. They get into why shaping that agent's behavior makes the modern controls engineer as much psychologist as engineer.
The conversation also gets into the plants where these agents already run, a 20-year control problem one of them quietly solved, and why Phillip is adamant this technology exists to back up human operators rather than replace them.

More on ⁠AIOps: https://ai-ops.com/
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Jordan Punch, Senior Functional Safety Engineer at Reynolds and Moore, joins Erik Reynolds to talk about what it takes to write a safety standard for AI from scratch. As a voting member of ISO SC42 JWG4, the working group developing ISO/IEC TS 22440, Jordan has spent the past two years helping shape the first international standard for AI functional safety.
They cover the committee draft process and the roughly 1,700 comments national bodies returned, each of which has to be answered before publication. They get into the difference between a technical report, a technical specification, and a full international standard, and what each means for certification.
The conversation also gets into the publication timeline, why it could slip from early 2027 into later that year, and the one thing Jordan wants engineers and safety managers to take away as 22440 moves toward release.
Want to understand ISO/IEC TS 22440 in more depth? Reynolds and Moore is hosting two upcoming events for you:
ISO/IEC TS 22440: Inside the Standard, a 45-minute webinar with Jordan on June 30, 2026 at 10 AM CDT.
Understanding ISO/IEC TS 22440, a two-day training in Boston on October 14–15, 2026.
Register Today: www.reynolds-moore.com/events

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