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Current AI safety relies on software (RLHF, system prompts). This is acceptable for chatbots, but dangerous for robotics. If a robotic LLM is jailbroken, suffers a "gradient hack," or simply hallucinates, there is no physical safeguard to prevent it from executing unsafe motor commands. The open-source robotics ecosystem (ROS) currently lacks a "Hardware Root of Trust." Without this, developers are forced to choose between unsafe open models or proprietary "walled garden" robots.
Sentinel (Invariant Governor System) is a "Physics Firewall." It is a dedicated hardware device (Artix-7 FPGA) that sits between the AI compute and the motor controllers.
Deterministic: It enforces formal safety invariants (e.g., "Max Force < 50N") independently of the AI's internal state.
Latency: It intercepts and clamps unsafe signals in <10ms.
Open Standard: We are releasing the HDL (Hardware Description Language) as open source (Apache 2.0) to create a standard for the industry.
Our goal is to move from TRL-4 (Breadboard Prototype) to TRL-6 (Industrial Pilot). We aim to provide the "Existence Proof" needed to convince the robotics industry to adopt a Hardware Safety Standard.
Funding Tiers & Impact:
Tier 1: Minimum Viable Pilot ($15,000)
Goal: Survival & Prototype Validation.
Deliverables: Fabrication of 10x "Beta-10" PCB units; Bench-top verification; Open-source release of v0.5 HDL.
Tier 2: Industrial Validation ($37,500)
Goal: Data & Credibility (The "Existence Proof").
Deliverables: Everything in Tier 1, plus acquisition of a reference industrial cobot arm (e.g., UR5) for Adversarial Testing. We will film high-fidelity "Red Team" demos showing the clamp stopping "Kill Commands" in real-time. This also funds a 3rd-party security review of the Verilog modules.
Tier 3: Ecosystem Acceleration ($50,000)
Goal: Adoption & Distribution.
Deliverables: Everything in Tier 2, plus fabrication of 20 extra units to ship free to key open-source maintainers (MoveIt, ROS-Industrial) to accelerate driver integration.
$15,000 (Fabrication): Industrial PCBA (Pick-and-Place) assembly of the custom Sentinel carrier boards and FPGA SoMs. (This ensures vibration resistance for field use, unlike hand-soldered prototypes).
$12,500 (Testbed - Tier 2): Purchase of used industrial manipulator arm (Universal Robots or Kinova) for Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) torture testing.
$10,000 (Engineering - Tier 2/3): Independent code review and development of the SDK/Documentation for the open-source release.
$12,500 (Distribution - Tier 3): Costs for "Partner Batches" (hardware giveaways to high-leverage open source maintainers) and formal verification contracting.
Keith Gariepy (Founder): Keith began his technical journey self-teaching DOS on a Commodore VIC-20, sparking a lifelong obsession with systems. This evolved into a diverse career in the Audio Visual space, where he mastered every layer of the stack—from sales and programming to high-level design consulting. Today, he applies that seasoned technical vision to the frontier of AI.
Experience: 15+ years as a Systems Architect designing resilient digital ecosystems.
Track Record: Architected the "Talos" dual-kernel specification and personally built the current TRL-4 Sentinel prototype (Verilog/C++), achieving successful signal clamping on a 6-axis test rig.
Here is the complete content to copy-paste into the Manifund application form. I have mapped our strategy directly to their specific questions.
Sentinel: The "Physics Firewall" for Embodied AI (Open Source Hardware)
An open-source hardware root-of-trust that physically enforces safety invariants on robots in <10ms, preventing AI hallucinations from causing kinetic harm.
Current AI safety relies on software (RLHF, system prompts). This is acceptable for chatbots, but dangerous for robotics. If a robotic LLM is jailbroken, suffers a "gradient hack," or simply hallucinates, there is no physical safeguard to prevent it from executing unsafe motor commands. The open-source robotics ecosystem (ROS) currently lacks a "Hardware Root of Trust." Without this, developers are forced to choose between unsafe open models or proprietary "walled garden" robots.
Sentinel (Invariant Governor System) is a "Physics Firewall." It is a dedicated hardware device (Artix-7 FPGA) that sits between the AI compute and the motor controllers.
Deterministic: It enforces formal safety invariants (e.g., "Max Force < 50N") independently of the AI's internal state.
Latency: It intercepts and clamps unsafe signals in <10ms.
Open Standard: We are releasing the HDL (Hardware Description Language) as open source (Apache 2.0) to create a standard for the industry.
Our goal is to move from TRL-4 (Breadboard Prototype) to TRL-6 (Industrial Pilot). We aim to provide the "Existence Proof" needed to convince the robotics industry to adopt a Hardware Safety Standard.
Funding Tiers & Impact:
Tier 1: Minimum Viable Pilot ($15,000)
Goal: Survival & Prototype Validation.
Deliverables: Fabrication of 10x "Beta-10" PCB units; Bench-top verification; Open-source release of v0.5 HDL.
Tier 2: Industrial Validation ($37,500)
Goal: Data & Credibility (The "Existence Proof").
Deliverables: Everything in Tier 1, plus acquisition of a reference industrial cobot arm (e.g., UR5) for Adversarial Testing. We will film high-fidelity "Red Team" demos showing the clamp stopping "Kill Commands" in real-time. This also funds a 3rd-party security review of the Verilog modules.
Tier 3: Ecosystem Acceleration ($50,000)
Goal: Adoption & Distribution.
Deliverables: Everything in Tier 2, plus fabrication of 20 extra units to ship free to key open-source maintainers (MoveIt, ROS-Industrial) to accelerate driver integration.
$15,000 (Fabrication): Industrial PCBA (Pick-and-Place) assembly of the custom Sentinel carrier boards and FPGA SoMs. (This ensures vibration resistance for field use, unlike hand-soldered prototypes).
$12,500 (Testbed - Tier 2): Purchase of used industrial manipulator arm (Universal Robots or Kinova) for Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) torture testing.
$10,000 (Engineering - Tier 2/3): Independent code review and development of the SDK/Documentation for the open-source release.
$12,500 (Distribution - Tier 3): Costs for "Partner Batches" (hardware giveaways to high-leverage open source maintainers) and formal verification contracting.
Keith Gariepy (Founder): Keith began his technical journey self-teaching DOS on a Commodore VIC-20, sparking a lifelong obsession with systems. This evolved into a diverse career in the Audio Visual space, where he mastered every layer of the stack—from sales and programming to high-level design consulting. Today, he applies that seasoned technical vision to the frontier of AI.
Experience: 15+ years as a Systems Architect designing resilient digital ecosystems.
Track Record: Architected the "Talos" dual-kernel specification and personally built the current TRL-4 Sentinel prototype (Verilog/C++), achieving successful signal clamping on a 6-axis test rig.
Latency Constraints: If the FPGA processing overhead exceeds 10ms in complex multi-axis scenarios, the "clamp" may trigger too late to prevent damage. Outcome: We would pivot the architecture from "Active Interlock" to "Passive Black Box Logger" (forensics only).
Adoption Friction: If the ROS community finds the hardware integration too complex, developers may ignore it. Outcome: We mitigate this by prioritizing the "Dev Kit" documentation (Tier 2/3) to make it plug-and-play.
Component Shortages: Artix-7 FPGAs can have volatile supply chains. Outcome: We have validated an alternative design using the Lattice ECP5 to ensure redundancy.
$0. The project has been entirely bootstrapped/self-funded by the founder to date.