Concept note · the lab vocabulary
Human-aware safety
Sensing the person before contact — the machine yields first, every time.
What it is
The machine senses the person before contact, and yields first — every time, in every mode, without being asked. Not a guard rail around the machine; a property of the machine. The person never has to know the rule for the rule to protect them.
In the lab
- Cordless Electricity →
- Two layers over lasers: the sub-millisecond handshake-break cut-off is the reactive floor; the gaze guard is the predictive layer that means it almost never has to fire.
- Autonomous Mowers →
- Holds for people, not swerves — the work clock stops entirely, the beacon quickens, and the machine resumes only when the fairway is clear. If everything fails, it is a nudge.
Our position
Safety comes in two layers, and the layers have different jobs. The reactive floor is the guarantee: a broken optical handshake kills a beam cluster in under a millisecond; a slow machine wears a soft rubber bumper so the worst case is engineered down to a nudge. The predictive layer sits above it so the guarantee almost never fires: a gaze guard pre-empts the beam before a line of sight can form; pedestrian proximity pauses a mower’s work clock before its path and the person’s ever intersect. And safety should be visible character, not hidden compliance — hunter-vest hulls, a beacon that quickens when holding: the machine shows you it saw you.
Honest limitations
Predictive layers are only as good as their sensing — occlusion and blind spots degrade them, which is exactly why the reactive floor must be sufficient alone. Yielding first costs throughput: paused work clocks mean phase drift and longer jobs, a price we pay on purpose. And there is no universal safety layer — the laser cut-off and the soft bumper share a philosophy but not a mechanism, so every new machine re-earns the property in its own physics, then faces its own domain’s certification path.
Related in the vocabulary
- Wireless power →
- Meets it in Cordless Electricity — delivering energy through open air precisely enough to retire the cord.
- Autonomy →
- Meets it in Autonomous Mowers — machines that carry a job from start to finish without a hand on them.
The experiments are the proof
Every claim in this note is made concrete somewhere in the lab — the idea exists because the machines needed it.
The map of the lab →