Evidence, not assertion
A component is safe for a use because someone can show the argument and the evidence behind it, not because it is popular, mature, or widely deployed.
Open Source Safety Consortium
Safety-critical robots run on open source.
The assurance evidence to justify that has never been shared. We are building it in the open: hazard analyses, safety arguments, and qualification evidence for the open source components robotics already depends on.
The problem
Everyone qualifies the same components, separately, in private.
A robotics company qualifying a message-passing library for a safety-critical deployment does months of hazard analysis, test campaign design, and evidence assembly. So does the next company. And the next. None of them can see each other's work, none of it goes upstream, and the library's maintainers never learn what was found.
The result is a robotics industry that spends enormously on assurance and accumulates almost nothing. The consortium exists to change where that work lands.
Principles01 02 03 04
What the consortium commits to.
Shared assurance artifacts
Hazard analyses, test evidence, and safety arguments are expensive to produce and wasteful to duplicate. Members publish them once, in a common form, for everyone.
Upstream first
Safety work belongs in the projects themselves. Findings, patches, and tooling go upstream rather than into private forks that decay in isolation.
Honest scope
Every artifact states plainly what it does and does not cover. An assurance claim without stated limits is not an assurance claim.
Work
What the consortium is building.
Protective Stop
An open source safety stop for robots and industrial machines, with its assurance case written in public alongside the device.
SAHARA: Structured Automation of Hazard Analysis & Risk Assessment
A tool for running HARAs in the context of robotics.
Latest
News
Our lightning talk at ROSCon Global 2026
Two minutes at ROSCon Global in Toronto on why safety work on robots is slow, costly and private, and what changes when it is done in the open.
An interview on why the consortium exists
Andra Keay talks to Ilia Baranov for Robots & Startups about the near-miss that started it, what a protective stop has to do that an emergency stop cannot, and what the consortium will and will not publish.
Robots & Startups covers the consortium
Andra Keay's newsletter reports on the consortium's first public introduction, at a Silicon Valley Robotics event in San Francisco on September 2, and repeats the call for members.
Building a safety-critical robot on open source?
The consortium is open to organizations and engineers who build, deploy, or maintain open source software in robots where failure causes harm. Members do the assurance work together and in public, and everything that comes out is published for anyone to use.