Florian Weisshardt
Head of Synapticon Intelligence
Dr.-Ing. Florian Weisshardt is Head of Synapticon Intelligence, the software and AI unit behind POSITRON Safety AI, Synapticon’s certified functional safety platform for humanoid and advanced robotics. He holds a doctorate from the University of Stuttgart with a thesis on automated test and evaluation frameworks f or service robotics, and previously spent eight years at Fraunhofer IPA as a research associate and project manager in service robotics and system integration. In 2015 he co-founded Mojin Robotics (today 4am Robotics) as CTO. He is a long-standing contributor to the ROS and ROS-Industrial community.
All Sessions by Florian Weisshardt
May 27, 2026
Advanced Functional Safety for Humanoids
2:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Engineering Theater in Expo Hall
For fifty years, industrial robot safety has meant one thing: the cage. Put the machine behind a fence, add a light curtain, and cut the power if anyone gets close. That model collapses the moment a robot leaves the cage and walks on two legs through a shared workspace.
In this talk, Florian Weisshardt makes the case that humanoids cannot inherit the safety playbook of industrial robotics. He will show how Synapticon's POSITRON platform is rewriting that playbook from first principles:
- Safe Torque Off does not work on two legs. A humanoid is an inverted pendulum. Cutting the power doesn't make it safe — it makes it fall. Safety for legged systems requires *active* safe motion, not the absence of motion.
- 50+ degrees of freedom need a new safety architecture. POSITRON delivers certified (SIL3, PLe) Safe Motion monitoring across the entire kinematic chain, including safe inverse kinematics for 7-DoF arms — a scale unreachable with traditional safety PLCs.
- From 2D LIDAR to Safe Human Detection. Perception-based safety replaces physical guards: camera-based detection with and without AI, real-time 3D person tracking, SIL2/PLd certification in preparation.
- Behavioral Safety — making black-box AI certifiable. A multimodal AI layer analyzes the robot's environment and anticipates hazards *before* they become incidents. The hard question — how to scale black-box learning models into certifiable production systems — is exactly the question POSITRON is built to answer.
- Hardware designed for the standards.Two platforms, one certification philosophy: POSITRON STA1 (dual 800 MHz ARM) for deterministic motion safety, POSITRON STN1 (NVIDIA IGX Jetson Thor) for the AI-heavy safety stack. Both aligned to ISO 26262, IEC 61508, ISO 13849 and ISO/IEC TS 22440, and certified by TÜV Rheinland.
Humanoids will not reach real-world deployment on the back of engineering heroics and disclaimers. They will reach it on the back of a certifiable safety architecture built for how they actually move, perceive and decide. That architecture exists today.
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Events Sales Director
csepich@wtwhmedia.com
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Heather Herbert
Event Sales Manager
hherbert@wtwhmedia.com
512-760-0570
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