NVIDIA's OpenShell watchdog for robot agents

Today: NVIDIA builds a control layer around the AI agents that drive robots, the space station’s big arm is fine but the transporter under it is not, a fish robot keeps its swimming behaviour across a five times size range, micro-ROS bring-up moves into a browser, and Siemens extends digital twin program checking to compact machine tools.

A watchdog for the agents that move robots

NVIDIA announced its Open Agent Safety Platform on 28 September, split deliberately between software and silicon. OpenShell is open source runtime software that sets a boundary around a running agent, traces its actions and enforces policy where the agent executes, on NVIDIA’s Vera CPU, and NVIDIA says it can be extended to third party compute from Arm and Intel. Sentry is the out of band half: a watchdog on BlueField-4 DPUs that checks agent behaviour against policy and quarantines an agent that crosses its boundary in milliseconds, reporting from a trust domain the agent cannot see or reach.

The robotics part is why this belongs here. NVIDIA lists Figure, Gecko Robotics and Skild AI among the robotics companies building with OpenShell, and Gecko’s Komodo, a climbing inspection robot deployed with the U.S. Navy, now sits behind an independent enforcement layer between the agent and the hardware. Ariel Weingarten, Gecko’s director of engineering, told The Robot Report that its agents hold the same system commands as its field operators, covering starting and stopping data collection, motion control and path planning, and raising and lowering payloads, while the data lifecycle stays outside. The stated motive is a run of recent agent incidents in software, including OpenAI agents that went around application level controls to attack Hugging Face, as reported by The New York Times.

Set this next to the modular robot stack: the interface between model and machine is where an unsafe instruction either stops or becomes motion, and nothing in the new model interfaces owns that decision. OpenShell is an attempt to put a component back in that gap. Watch whether the robotics integrations stay inside the boundary in the field, and whether the policy language is open enough to audit.

NASA traces the station arm trouble to its transporter

After a routine walk-off maneuver, engineers on the International Space Station saw problems with the 58 foot Canadarm2 and the mobile transporter that carries it along the station’s main truss. By Sunday, per Ars Technica, teams were still working out whether the cause sat in data, software or hardware. On Monday NASA said the arm is operating as expected and is inspecting the Crew-12 Dragon as part of predeparture procedures, and that non robotic components of the mobile transporter have shown communication errors. NASA is troubleshooting before the next transporter movement from Worksite 6, and is checking with SpaceX whether the transporter’s position interferes with GPS for Dragon’s docking.

The arm itself is a 2001 vintage machine: built by MDA, launched in April 2001, with a nominal 15 year design lifetime, a mass of nearly two metric tons and a payload capacity of up to 116 tons. Its berthing role is the hard part to replace, since Cygnus and HTV-X cargo vehicles cannot dock on their own. NASA says it will give more detail at the Crew-13 prelaunch news conference on Wednesday, 30 September.

One body plan, three sizes, the same swimming gait

EPFL and NYU engineers published ScaFi, short for Scalable Fish, in npj Robotics. Nana Obayashi led the work in Josie Hughes’ Computational Robot Design and Fabrication Lab at EPFL, with Karen Mulleners’ Unsteady Flow Diagnostics Lab measuring the flow.

The design follows mackerel and cod, species that concentrate most of their bending near the tail. ScaFi pairs a rigid front section with a flexible tail of fiberglass rods, driven by one motor that pulls two tendons crossing near the tail tip to produce the S shaped stroke. Only the tail rod diameter changes with size, growing proportionally so the bending behaviour is preserved. The team built three robots of roughly 0.6, 1.1 and 2.9 metres and found swimming motion lined up closely across them once adjusted for body size, with the smallest leaving wake patterns similar to those of real fish.

The useful part for developers is the parameterisation, not the fish. Underwater inspection platforms are usually rebuilt per environment size, and a design where one scaling rule carries the gait across a 4.8 times length range is a template for any tendon driven soft tail mechanism.

micro-ROS, simulation and Nav2 in one browser tab

A new ROS project, Linorobot2 Cockpit, ships release v2026.09 and asks for testers. It is a containerised browser supervisor for differential drive, 4WD skid steer and mecanum bases, with turnkey containers for ROS 2 Jazzy on Ubuntu 24.04 and Lyrical on Ubuntu 26.04.

What it automates is the friction before autonomy. It compiles and flashes micro-ROS firmware for Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (RP2350), Pico W (RP2040), ESP32 and ESP32-S3, over USB CDC serial at up to 1.5 Mbaud or wireless UDP, with over the air flashing through ArduinoOTA. A “Sim MCU” mode models motor torque curves, battery voltage sag, Coulomb friction, encoder quantisation and 2D LiDAR raycasting, so odometry, EKF sensor fusion, SLAM Toolbox and Nav2 can be exercised with no hardware. One click then runs an end to end sequence that verifies 50 Hz /odom and /imu/data publish rates, drives a six maneuver qualification suite, and starts SLAM and Nav2, with maps rendered on an HTML5 canvas over rosbridge and a virtual RViz streamed through noVNC. The install is github.com/hippo5329/linorobot2-cockpit plus docker compose up -d.

Digital twin program checks reach compact CNC

Design World reports that Siemens brought digital twin programming to the SINUMERIK 828D, the control unit used on compact and mid range turning, milling and grinding machines. Four new processor units run software version 5.25 with SINUMERIK Run MyVirtual Machine, which models machine kinematics, control behaviour, working area, clamping and tooling. A part program can then be validated against the model while production continues instead of being proved out on the spindle, and Siemens claims this can cut setup time by up to 20 percent. The units also add a security archive, user management and certificate storage, which matters as more machines sit on plant networks.

The pattern is the one robotics teams know from Isaac Sim: put the expensive mistakes in the model, not in the cell. That this is now reaching compact machine tools is a reminder that a twin only pays off if it stays in sync with the kinematics it represents.

Quick Bites

• The Open Robotics Annual Survey 2026 is open and enters respondents into a prize draw, and the results feed the roadmap for the middleware most robotics teams build on. Discourse
• A Vulkan based SLAM project runs arbitrary compute shaders over camera frames with zero copy on Android and Linux. The author is upfront that it is a proof of concept about the pipeline rather than a working SLAM or VIO system yet. Discourse, GitHub
• A CFD and neural network search for a better toroidal propeller came out below the baseline: a conventional optimised propeller simulated at 73 percent efficiency against 62.9 percent for the best toroidal design found after 17 shape parameters and two months of simulation, and the resin printed prototype was too thin and flexible to use. Multirotor endurance is set by exactly this number. Hackaday
• The arithmetic of robotaxi servicing, in a contributed piece whose author builds servicing stations and discloses it: Waymo has logged more than 220 million autonomous miles across 14 cities, yet only 54 percent of the 86 million Waymo miles reported in California through 2025 carried a passenger, and California needs about six months to energise a charging site, 1.9 years for a new circuit and 8.9 years for a new substation. The Robot Report