NVIDIA Builds Safety Net for the Robot Revolution at GTC 2026

A New Safety Standard for Physical AI

As robots move beyond controlled factory floors into warehouses, hospitals, and public spaces, the question of safety has become urgent. At NVIDIA's GTC 2026 conference in San Jose, a growing coalition of technology companies signalled that the era of ad-hoc robotics safety is coming to an end.

Novanta, a supplier of precision motion control and sensing technologies, announced it has joined the NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab. The programme is the first in the world to be accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board under ISO/IEC 17020 for an inspection plan that combines functional safety, cybersecurity, AI safety, and regulatory compliance into a single framework. That accreditation is recognised in eighty countries, including China.

What the Partnership Delivers

Through the collaboration, Novanta will validate that its motion control and sensing hardware works safely and reliably with NVIDIA platforms, including the newly generally available IGX Thor. Built on the Blackwell architecture, IGX Thor is an industrial-grade edge computing platform delivering over five thousand teraflops of AI compute with high-speed connectivity, designed for real-time decision-making in safety-critical environments.

The goal is to reduce integration headaches for robotics manufacturers. Rather than each company independently certifying every component combination, the Halos lab provides a centralised validation process covering warehouse automation, industrial robotics, and humanoid platforms.

A Growing Ecosystem

Novanta is far from alone. At GTC 2026, companies including AEye, Gatik, Hesai, Lattice Semiconductor, and Qt Group all announced they were joining the Halos ecosystem, adding to earlier members such as Bosch, Continental, and Sony Semiconductor Solutions. Meanwhile, NVIDIA unveiled partnerships with ABB, Universal Robots, and KUKA, and announced that more than two million robots worldwide now use its platforms.

Why It Matters

The Halos programme represents a shift from treating robot safety as an afterthought to embedding it as a core requirement. As NVIDIA pushes AI from digital agents into physical systems, having a globally recognised safety framework could accelerate adoption while giving regulators, manufacturers, and the public greater confidence that the robots entering daily life have been rigorously tested.