Safety Third: Autonomous Revolution

In honor of Reynolds & Moore's 10 year anniversary, co-founders Erik and Missy Reynolds sit down with producer Ginny Spellman to talk about how the company got built and how the functional safety industry has changed over that time.

They cover the founding story, the culture Erik and Missy wanted to build from day one, and what it took to grow from a one-person consultancy to a global team. The conversation also gets into how the market for functional safety has shifted over the last decade, the role Missy is stepping into around developing and training Reynolds & Moore engineers, and where the company is headed in the next 10 years.

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Paul Schmitt, Director of Engineering at Reynolds & Moore, joins Erik Reynolds to explore what the safety community still has not solved: how robots decide what to do. Paul brings decades of experience across Ford, iRobot, and autonomous trucking to a conversation about the behavior layer in physical AI.

They cover human-robot interaction research, including a study on how pedestrians actually respond to driverless vehicles, and why the answer had nothing to do with lights or sounds. Paul and Erik also dig into behavior hierarchies and the trolley problem applied to real robotics scenarios.

The conversation also gets into why current machine learning safety standards still read more like guidelines than engineering requirements. Paul shares details on his work as a co-author of "The ML FMEA in Action: Lessons from Applications of Machine Learning Safety," documenting how the open-sourced ML FMEA framework connects machine learning development decisions to system-level safety outcomes, with applications across autonomous vehicles, humanoid robotics, and beyond.

Read Paul's paper: The ML FMEA in Action: Lessons from Applications of Machine Learning Safety
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Bodo Seifert, Principal Automotive Functional Safety Engineer and Practice Lead at TÜV Rheinland, joins Erik Reynolds to share what certification bodies actually see when companies come in for assessment.

They cover the organizational and technical red flags that assessors look for, and why good engineering practice and a formal safety case are not the same thing. Bodo draws on experience across automotive, robotics, and autonomous trucking to explain what separates companies that certify successfully from those that do not.

The conversation also gets into the shift from deterministic functional safety to AI-enabled systems. Bodo explains what ISO/TR 5469 and ISO/IEC TS 22440 mean for teams building physical AI, and why transparency and explainability remain the hardest requirements for machine learning developers to accept. They also discuss why strategic collaborations like the one between Reynolds & Moore and TÜV Rheinland matter for companies navigating certification for the first time.

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In this episode of the Safety Third Podcast, Erik Reynolds speaks with Dr. Werner Krauss, head of the research division for automation and robotics at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA), where he has spent 15 years bridging academic research and real-world industrial deployment.
They cover the real engineering challenges behind deploying humanoid robots in industrial settings, drawing on Fraunhofer IPA's hands-on evaluation of the UNITREE G1 across safety, cybersecurity, clean room performance, and what those findings mean for trusting these platforms in the real world. Werner also shares what surprised his team most about these platforms, why end users are harder to design for than the robots themselves, and the incident from his own career that changed how Fraunhofer trains everyone who operates a robot.
Read the Fraunhofer IPA's 3-part series on humanoid robots in industry.
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Erik welcomes back Josiah Rohne, Staff Systems Engineer at Fennec Engineering, to discuss ASAP, Fennec's full-lifecycle functional safety platform, and the shift from fragmented tools to a single connected workflow. ASAP connects risk assessment, requirements, design, testing, and the safety case through shared traceability, while Fennec Engineering also develops dedicated test environments for safety validation, with the results feeding back into the platform to support certification.

The conversation looks at scaling safety beyond a single owner, managing the impact of hardware and BOM changes, and why closing the gap between development and real-world validation is becoming critical. Josiah closes with a reflection on why the real measure of success in safety is often the incidents that never happen.

Fennec Engineering is part of the R&M Safety Partner Ecosystem. Reynolds & Moore is hosting a 45-minute webinar in collaboration with Fennec Engineering, Modernizing Functional Safety: Building Your Safety Case Without Spreadsheets on March 31, 10:00 AM - 10:45 CST.

Register here.

Missed Josiah's first episode? Listen here.

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