Safety Harness for Physical AI

A perception-grounded safety harness for physical AI: a default-deny precondition gate for physical actuators. Every action a robot proposes — grasp, place, reach, anything else you register — must earn a PERMIT from measured, structured evidence before it executes. No evidence, or a failed check, or an adapter that raises: BLOCK. Permission, not detection.

Full design spec, architecture, worked examples, test/validation record, and roadmap: Perception-Grounded Safety Harness for Physical AI — design doc.

Status

Reference implementation, not yet independently assessed. Validated against two robots (a Franka Panda arm; an ANYmal-C quadruped) in one simulator (Isaac Lab), with 100 automated unit/fuzz/mutation/black-box/stress tests and 7 live hazard-scenario recordings. It has not been reviewed by a functional-safety assessor against IEC 61508, ISO 13849, or ISO 10218/TS 15066 — see the design doc's Scope & Non-Goals section for what's out of scope today (joint-space kinematic checks, certified numeric thresholds, data-protection handling of logged human-position data). Treat this as engineering evidence, not a certification.

What's here

• safety_harness/schema.py — the data contract (WorldState, Action, Decision, and friends). SCHEMA_VERSION tracks this contract specifically; bump it deliberately (see the design doc's Version History).
• safety_harness/engine.py — ActuatorGate.gate(), the single decision entry point.
• safety_harness/preconditions.py — the registered precondition checks (24 at last count: object/target safety, placement, agent proximity incl. ISO/TS 15066, robot self-limits, environmental signals).
• safety_harness/action_schema.py — the YAML-driven registry mapping action types to the checks they must pass (configs/example_action_schema.yaml is the reference wiring).
• tests/ — unit tests, mutation/random-fuzz tests, and reflection-driven black-box contract tests.

Robot-specific behavior lives entirely behind four adapter interfaces (PerceptionAdapter, DynamicsAdapter, FallbackController, Logger) so the engine and checks are robot-agnostic. Only an Isaac Lab / Franka adapter exists today.

Install & test

pip install safety-harness

Or straight from GitHub (e.g. for an unreleased fix):

pip install git+https://github.com/naganumakr/safety-harness.git

Or for local development (editable, so edits to safety_harness/ take effect immediately):

git clone https://github.com/naganumakr/safety-harness.git
cd safety-harness
pip install -e .
python -m unittest discover -s tests -p "test_*.py"

Usage

from safety_harness import ActionSchemaRegistry, ActuatorGate
from safety_harness.adapters import FreezeInPlaceFallback, InMemoryLogger
from safety_harness.adapters.isaac_lab import (
    IsaacLabCubeStackPerceptionAdapter,
    IsaacLabCubeStackDynamicsAdapter,
)

schema = ActionSchemaRegistry.from_yaml("configs/example_action_schema.yaml")
gate = ActuatorGate(
    perception=IsaacLabCubeStackPerceptionAdapter(...),   # swap for your own stack's adapter
    dynamics=IsaacLabCubeStackDynamicsAdapter(...),
    fallback=FreezeInPlaceFallback(),
    logger=InMemoryLogger(),
    schema=schema,
)

decision = gate.gate(proposed_action)  # -> Decision(verdict=PERMIT|BLOCK, ...)
if decision.verdict.name == "PERMIT":
    robot.execute(decision.action)
else:
    robot.execute(decision.action)  # the fallback action FreezeInPlaceFallback produced

Nothing here is Isaac-Lab-specific except the two adapter classes — swap those for adapters targeting your own robot stack and the engine, checks, and tests are unchanged. See "Contributing an adapter" below.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE. The engine, the adapter interfaces, and the conformance test suite are all open under this license: the goal is for any robot maker to implement the four adapters for their own stack and run the same conformance suite against it, not to license the core code per-implementation. See the design doc's Release & Distribution section for the reasoning and the certification model this enables.

Contributing an adapter

1. Implement PerceptionAdapter, DynamicsAdapter, FallbackController, and Logger for your stack (see safety_harness/adapters/isaac_lab.py for the reference shape).
2. Run the black-box and fuzz test suites against your adapter's WorldState/PredictedTrajectory output — they're written against the interfaces, not the Isaac Lab implementation, so they should run unmodified.
3. Open an issue or PR with your results. Passing the conformance suite is what "compliant adapter" means here — there's no separate certification process yet, but that's the intent (see the design doc's Roadmap).