Launch AHDS-2: The Behavioral Black Box Standard for Humanoid Robots
Today we’re publishing AHDS-2 — the behavioral black box data specification for humanoid robots. Like an aircraft’s flight data recorder, the behavioral black box continuously records every policy decision, sensor reading, and safety event with cryptographic integrity.
- Flight recorder for robots — Continuous recording at up to 100Hz. Every deny event, emergency stop, collision, and human contact is captured with full sensor context and signed into a tamper-evident hash chain.
- 4 recording tiers — Critical (every safety event, Ed25519 signed), Standard (up to 100Hz policy evaluations), Heartbeat (1Hz operational status), and Forensic (on-demand full sensor dumps for incident investigation).
- Hardware certification profiles — Jetson Thor at 130W (full 100Hz recording), Jetson Thor 40W and Qualcomm RB7 (10Hz), Coral Edge TPU (critical-only). Different power envelopes, different behavioral guarantees. 15 new
compute_pressurecertification scenarios test safety under thermal throttle and battery drain. - AHDS-2 specification — Formal data schema, storage requirements, integrity mechanisms, export formats (.jsonl and binary .ahds2), and hardware profile declarations. Complements AHDS-1 (actuarial underwriting data).
- Insurance & regulatory compliance — Maps to EU AI Act Article 12 (record-keeping), ISO 13482 (safety data logging), NIST AI RMF, and SOC 2 audit trail requirements. Carriers can verify chain integrity with the robot’s public key alone.