Runtime Safety and Emergency Stops on a Full-Size Humanoid: Deployment Lessons and a Case for Graduated Force Authority

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Full-size humanoid robots are being considered for hazardous industrial work such as disassembling electric-vehicle batteries. We describe the safety mechanisms of an open-source autonomy stack for the Unitree H1-2 humanoid and what deploying them taught us. All joint commands pass through a safety layer that runs separately from the control software. It enforces joint position, velocity, and torque limits, and it stops the robot when a state estimate becomes stale or when the hard-wired emergency stop (e-stop) is pressed or disconnected. We pushed the standing robot until it lost balance. With a model-predictive lower-body controller it never recovered, and the operator had to press the e-stop in every trial. Pressing it removes balance control, and the robot falls. The safety layer's own limits trigger the same stop, and limits chosen for manipulation were exceeded during normal walking. Near an operator or a battery pack, the fall can be more dangerous than the cause of the stop. Joint limits bound how much force a robot can apply, but not when applying it is appropriate. Drawing on research on responsibility and on child and adolescent development, we therefore make a case for granting robots force authority in stages, with a person or organization explicitly responsible for its use.

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