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.
Polymath Robotics CTO Ilia Baranov introduced the consortium at Bots, Bevs and Invests, a Silicon Valley Robotics event held with Ultimate Bots in San Francisco on Wednesday, September 2. It was the first time the consortium had been presented in public. He showed the Protective Stop, the device whose assurance case is the consortium’s first deliverable, and drew the distinction the project turns on: an emergency stop cuts power and leaves the machine wherever inertia puts it, while a protective stop commands a controlled shutdown into a defined state.
Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics wrote up the evening in her newsletter on September 5: Robotics investor insights and Open Source Safety Consortium, in Robots & Startups. The consortium section is short and accurate, and it carries the message that matters at this stage: the consortium is in its founding phase and wants to hear from prospective industry members, organizations already doing safety assurance work, project maintainers, and safety assessors.
The rest of the piece covers the investor panel Baranov sat on with Rahul Meka of Playground Global, Xenia Bulatov of Ultimate Bots, Michael Harries of The Robotics Hub Fund, and Aaron Edsinger of Hello Robot. One point from that discussion belongs here. Every panelist agreed that reliability is what robotics companies are finally judged on, and that it is learned through iteration. Meka’s example was a single fault taking a $500,000-an-hour vehicle out of action. The consortium’s argument is that the safety evidence produced while learning those lessons should not be lost each time, and should not have to be produced again by the next company.
If your organization builds, deploys, or maintains open source software in a system where failure causes harm, get in touch. Tell us what you build, which components you depend on, and what assurance work you have already done.