2025 Agenda

Jeff Fryman

Consultant
Association for Advancing Automation (A3)

Thomas Wedlick

Safety and Compliance
Amazon Lab126

This speech will focus on the main aspects of establishing a global center of excellence on robotics: mission, vision, strategic pillars, and plan to support the identification of safe robotics technologies in a complex logistics environment. Some relevant use cases on virtual models to enhance industrial operational safety, AI tools to support functional safety assessments, and the design of global products will also be introduced as a part of the Robotics Safety CoE execution plan.

Gianpiero Negri

Principal Manager - Robotics Safety Center of Excellence (RS CoE)
Amazon

Bob Bollinger

Owner
Dynamic Horizons Automation Solutions LLC

Brian Heater

Managing Editor
Association for Advancing Automation (A3)

Karthikeyan Subramaniam

CEO
Frizb Inc

Nathan Bivans

CTO
FORT Robotics

Thomas Wedlick

Safety and Compliance
Amazon Lab126

Physical AI is nowadays an essential element of robot safety, from direct control to supervision. This session will start by providing an overview of the Physical AI safety standardization landscape, with focus on ISO/IEC TS 22440 series on “Artificial intelligence — Functional safety and AI systems” and the relationship with ongoing projects such as ISO TC 299/WG 12/WD 25785-1.

Then, NVIDIA Halos will be presented, and how its comprehensive "edge to cloud" framework establishes a foundation for physical AI safety. The session will describe how Halo's principles and technologies apply to robot safety, at both design, deployment, and evaluation time.

Riccardo Mariani

Vice President of Industry Safety
NVIDIA

Safety-related sensors are used in robotics applications where there is a risk of personal injury. These sensors provide protection by ensuring that the robotic system returns to a safe state before any person can be exposed to a hazardous situation. The use of mobile robots and collaborative robotics has led to an increased demand for a wider range of sensor technologies (such as vision sensors, 3D LiDARs, or radar sensors), new sensor functions (like object classification and object tracking), and the combination of different sensors to detect humans and objects that could pose a risk.

The IEC 62998 series provides guidance for the safe detection of objects based on risk assessment in robotics applications. The standard is applicable for manufacturers of sensors, robots, or system integrators, and is prepared to connect with future safe AI standards.

Martin Wuestefeld

Vice President - Research and Development
SICK AG

As robotics systems become increasingly interconnected, intelligent, and integral to critical applications, ensuring robust software security is a legal and ethical imperative. The European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), set to reshape the cybersecurity landscape for all digital products, introduces binding requirements for manufacturers to address software vulnerabilities, enforce secure development practices, and provide lifecycle security support.

This session will explore how the CRA applies specifically to robotics—where embedded software, real-time control systems, and autonomous decision-making create unique security challenges. Attendees will gain clarity on how to assess software risk across the robotics value chain, implement secure development lifecycles (SDLs), and prepare for post-market obligations such as vulnerability handling and incident reporting.

Key topics will include:

• Understanding CRA compliance in the context of robotic systems
• Securing software supply chains and third-party components
• Integrating security-by-design and default principles into robotics R&D
• Practical steps to meet CRA obligations from development to deployment
• Anticipating future harmonized standards and their implications for certification

Whether you’re a robotics manufacturer, software developer, integrator, or safety engineer, this session will offer concrete guidance to align product development with emerging EU cybersecurity law, without compromising innovation or performance.

Marcellus Buchheit

President & CEO
Wibu-Systems USA Inc.

As collaborative robotics evolves, so must our approach to safety. This session explores the limitations of traditional Power and Force Limiting (PFL) and introduces a new paradigm: dynamic safety limits enabled with open APIs. This presentation will examine how robot manufacturers may work with third-party components to interface directly with robot controllers and dynamically adjust safety parameters like stopping time, tool speed, and momentum.

Christopher Savoia

Global Head of UR+ Ecosystem
Universal Robots

As robotics systems increasingly integrate AI – from collaborative cobots in manufacturing to autonomous service robots – the European regulatory framework is undergoing a profound transformation. The convergence of the EU AI Act, the new Machinery Regulation, the Cyber Resilience Act, and ISO 10218:2025 creates a multi-layered compliance landscape that manufacturers, integrators, and operators must navigate to ensure safety, liability management, and market access.

The session offers a practical roadmap for aligning robotic systems with these overlapping legal and technical requirements. Drawing on my experience in product liability and compliance, I will explore:

• How the AI Act’s risk-based classification intersects with safety obligations under the Machinery Regulation and how it interacts with ISO 10218:2025.
• Which regulatory requirements to observe for robots, including cybersecurity, and human-machine interaction.
• How to design compliance workflows that are both legally sound and operationally feasible.
• Strategies for future-proofing robotics products in light of evolving EU enforcement mechanisms and liability regimes.

Benedikt Rohrssen

Attorney-at-Law (Germany)
Taylor Wessing

With the continued shortage of arc welders and increasing demands for quality, employers, large and small, are turning to robotic automation and inexperienced employees to close the gap. In this breakout session, we will discuss how the recently harmonized A3 and AWS Robotics Safety Standards can help employers keep their arc welding employees safe.

Stuart Shepherd

President
Shepherd Solutions, Inc.

Across more than 200 autonomous mobile robots deployed in live manufacturing environments, ATI has learned that long-run safety performance emerges from choices made far upstream—in architecture, validation, and day-to-day operations. This talk introduces our 4S framework—Safety, Speed, Sturdiness, and Space—a practical lens for designing and operating mobile robot systems that are provably safe, predictably fast, mechanically and electronically robust, and spatially aware of real factory constraints. We will show how “Safety-first” is not at odds with throughput: dynamic speed-and-separation monitoring, geo-fenced behaviors, fault-tolerant perception, and rigorous commissioning turn safety constraints into production reliability. Using field evidence, we connect safety cases to measurable KPIs (near-miss rate, mission success under degraded sensing, MTBF of safety-critical components), and describe how Space—aisle widths, transfer station geometry, human work envelopes—often determine whether a “safe” design is also maintainable and scalable. Attendees will see how hazard analysis (like FMEA), mock-simulations feed into an always-current safety case that travels with the product from pilot to fleet scale.

The session is aimed at practitioners who must implement safe automation workflows in brownfield factories. Concretely, we will share: design patterns that prevent “fast-but-unsafe” regressions; commissioning checklists that tie ISO-aligned requirements to acceptance tests; telemetry practices that turn near-misses into corrective actions; and inculcating organizational safety hygiene(incident reviews, operator training, and configuration control) that sustain safety without sacrificing line cadence. Audience will leave with a reusable 4S worksheet to evaluate their own systems—translating principles into decisions about speed limits, protective zones, hardware redundancies, service intervals, and spatial layouts that keep operations safe and factories productive.

Naveen Arulselvan

Chief Technology Officer
Ati Motors