The Virtual Operator with Phillip Hansel

Dr. Sampson Gholston⁠, Chair of the Department of Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington, joins ⁠Erik Reynolds⁠ to talk about bringing functional safety into engineering education. Before academia, he worked as a supplier quality engineer at GM’s Saturn Corporation in the 1990s, where government requirements on vehicle lighting gave him his first real exposure to safety work.⁠Sampson⁠ shares his research on humans in the loop of complex systems like the Patriot missile defense system, along with parallels to air traffic control. His work looks at how cognitive workload, stress or fatigue can turn the human into the limiting factor in system performance.⁠Erik⁠ and ⁠Sampson⁠ discuss how society’s tolerance for risk has shifted over time, with the Ford Pinto as a lasting lesson in why cost calculations can’t stand in for safety decisions.⁠Sampson⁠ also previews IE 5358 Functional Safety Systems, a new graduate course at UTA offered in collaboration with ⁠R&M⁠ and taught by ⁠Erik⁠ himself. It launches spring 2027 with an online option, built with working professionals in mind, open to non-degree students as well. Registration opens in mid-November. The conversation closes on why safety engineering remains human work in an age of AI, as emerging rules increasingly call for a responsible person in the loop.More on UTA Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering: ⁠https://www.uta.edu/academics/schools-colleges/engineering/academics/departments/industrial⁠Questions about IE 5358: ⁠[email protected]⁠Check out our work: ⁠https://reynolds-moore.com/⁠

Geoffrey Athey, Chief Executive Officer at Reynolds & Moore, joins Erik and Missy Reynolds, the founders of R&M, to announce that the company is becoming employee-owned. Geoffrey spent more than 20 years leading manufacturing operations before coming to R&M as Chief Operating Officer in 2024. In that role he turned the company’s tribal knowledge into processes built to scale.R&M has doubled in size 3 years in a row. Geoffrey explains how defining trust, transparency, and care as specific behaviors kept the culture intact through that growth.With ownership now added as a core value, Geoffrey makes the case for why employee-owned companies outperform their peers. An individual contributor owns 8 steps of a 100 step process, while an owner watches every handoff. For clients, Erik says, that means their problems become R&M’s problems.Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

Mark Nehrkorn, Senior Director of Functional Safety & Compliance at Symbotic, joins Erik Reynolds to talk about why certified parts don't guarantee a certified system. Over more than 30 years in machine safety, Mark has worked at Boston Dynamics and SICK. Today he leads the team keeping Symbotic's robotic warehouse systems safe.Every certified component arrives with its own conditions for use, and Erik points out that the more components a system combines, the more likely those conditions are to conflict. Mark explains when an off-the-shelf certified part makes sense, and when building thousands of robots makes it smarter to design your own.Safety work doesn't stop at commissioning. Symbotic's robots each drive more than 50 miles a day, while electronic components can reach end of life in years or even months. Mark describes how losing access to a single part can send a newly certified system back to the start. It's part of why he sees the traditional 20-year mission time as less relevant than it used to be.Mark Nehrkorn is also speaking at the R&M Physical AI & Safety Summit on October 13 at MassRobotics in Boston.Register for the Summit: https://reynolds-moore.com/events/rm-physical-ai-safety-summit/More on Symbotic: https://www.symbotic.com/Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

Weihan Wang, Director at NexCOBOT, a NEXCOM International company, joins Erik Reynolds to talk about the hardware underneath robot safety. Weihan leads business development, product development, and functional safety for the robotics division and is the safety manager for the SCB 100.They cover how a motion controller, a PLC, and a safety controller differ, and what makes a safety rated PC a different product from a regular one. Weihan shares how NexCOBOT spent 4 years taking the SCB 100 through SIL 2 and PL d Category 3 certification. He also explains why force monitoring pushes robot makers away from safety PLCs and toward C and C++ on a PC platform, and how customers run redundant safety applications on 2 cores inside a single chip.The conversation then turns to humanoids, quadrupeds, and ISO 25785, which the ISO working group expects to publish around 2028. Weihan also describes the safety platform NexCOBOT is building on NVIDIA IGX Thor, where a safety island monitors the AI inference and a separate safety MCU serves as the backup.R&M and NexCOBOT are sharing a booth at NVIDIA GTC Berlin on October 20–22. Stop by to meet both teams.More on NexCOBOT: https://www.nexcobot.com/Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

Dr. Daniel Simon joins Erik on the podcast to talk about why the structure of safety critical software decides how safely it can be built and changed. Daniel is Distinguished Solutions Engineer at Qt Group, a member of the R&M Safety Partner Ecosystem. He co-originated Axivion Architecture Verification out of research at the University of Stuttgart and stayed with the work after Qt Group acquired Axivion.They cover what architecture verification checks, and why documented architectures go stale a few years into a project. Daniel explains why moving compute intensive code from CPU to GPU is an architectural exercise rather than a refactor. He also walks through the Axivion work on CUDA, including the collaboration with NVIDIA on their safety coding rules. The conversation ends on AI generated code and what it does to the person who has to sign off on it.Daniel is also speaking at the R&M Physical AI & Safety Summit on October 13 in Boston at MassRobotics, where he will cover why deterministic verification and emerging AI trust methods under IEC 61508 and ISO/IEC 22440 have to coexist as robotics teams pursue certification. The Summit is free to attend, and an evening reception at Qt Group follows. The next 2 days at MassRobotics, Reynolds & Moore is running Understanding ISO/IEC TS 22440, a training in collaboration with SafetyCert.AI.Register for the Summit: https://wkf.ms/4cdJRlFRegister for the 2-Day Training: https://wkf.ms/4gBG3MjMore on Qt Group: https://www.qt.io/Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

Chris Soranno, Manager of International Safety Standards at SICK Sensor Intelligence, joins Erik to take on a complaint the industry makes constantly, that safety standards are always behind the technology. Chris has spent 25 years inside that process. A technology has to prove it is not a passing trend before a committee will invest the effort, and by the time the first meeting happens, the market has already moved again.His argument is that a standard should say what has to be achieved, never how to achieve it. Chris points to the safety laser scanner, a proven technology that had nowhere to be applied because the application standards of the day named the light curtain as the only accepted answer.They also cover why risk assessment still holds up for machines whose behavior is harder to predict, why motion and contact are no longer treated as automatically hazardous, and what changes when the thing defeating your safeguard is an adversary rather than an accident.More on SICK Sensor Intelligence: https://www.sick.com/ Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

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.Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com

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/Check out our work: https://reynolds-moore.com/

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/More on Reynolds & Moore: https://reynolds-moore.com/