Considerations for Humanoid Robot Safety | Interview with Ricard Picas Prat

Humanoid robot safety is one of the biggest blind spots in the robotics industry right now, and most manufacturers still aren’t investing in it. In this episode of Humanoid Leaders, we sit down with Richard, Advanced Solutions Engineer at Novanta, to find out why.

Richard breaks down why humanoid robots are “dynamically stable”, meaning they need constant power and active control just to stay upright, and lose that stability the moment power fails. That makes traditional industrial robot safety, which relies on emergency stops, dangerous for humanoids: stopping a biped mid-motion just makes it fall.

We talk through how Novanta is solving this with its new Summit Safety servo drive series, which builds functional safety layers like safe torque off, safe limited speed, and safe limited position directly into compact, high-power servo drives designed for collaborative robots working near people.

We also cover Novanta’s role helping write the next generation of ISO safety standards for bipeds and quadrupeds, including its participation in the ISO committee for dynamically stable industrial robots and its work with the Nvidia Halos lab, which assesses safety for AI-based physical systems. Richard explains why AI-driven, non-deterministic control makes safety certification harder than it’s ever been for traditional robots, and what still needs to happen before humanoid robots can safely work alongside people, first in industrial settings, and eventually in homes.

0:00 Introduction

0:34 About Novanta and Richard’s role

1:19 What the industry gets wrong about humanoid safety

2:31 Key safety challenges for humanoid robots

4:00 Novanta’s Summit Safety servo drives

5:11 Shaping global robotics safety standards

6:19 The path to robots working safely alongside humans

Novanta are also our proud partners for this years 2026 Humanoid Robotics Industry Awards. Designed to recognise excellence across the humanoid robotics ecosystem, the awards highlight the individuals, organisations, and technologies shaping the future of the industry.

You can learn more about Novanta’s work in the humanoid space here: https://humanoidroboticstechnology.co…