Safety as a Competitive Advantage

Functional safety is the primary barrier to the widespread adoption of robotics. Fennec Engineering has addressed this bottleneck by securing independent certification from TÜV Rheinland for its Advanced Safety Acceleration Platform, known as ASAP. Fennec Engineering earned the T2 qualification through a year-long process that demonstrated the platform meets the requirements of IEC 61508 and ISO 13849 for software tools used in safety-critical development.

This qualification is more than a compliance checkbox. By codifying the process for IEC 61508 certification, Fennec is providing a roadmap for customers to integrate safety into the development lifecycle from the start. The company's approach treats safety as a feature that unlocks performance rather than a regulatory burden that slows down innovation.

The shift in complexity is significant. As Justin Croyle, chief product officer at Fennec, noted, safety evolved from physical guarding to E-stops, and since the 1980s, it has become more complex with the introduction of silicon. The current era of software, robotics, and AI introduces even higher levels of system complexity.

The risk of ignoring this complexity is high. Croyle cited a mobile robot program that required a massive rewrite and the hiring of dozens of engineers because the team lacked a coding standard and relied on static analysis, mistakenly believing they had a fault-tolerant architecture.

For developers, the implication is clear: safety must be systematically engineered into the product through end-to-end traceability. Fennec’s platform aims to act as a SaaS offering that simplifies this narrative, making it easier to demonstrate safety to both assessors and the public.

If you are building autonomous systems, evaluate whether your current development workflow treats safety as a "bolt-on" or as a foundational component of your architecture.