Eric Sivertson, VP of Security Business, Lattice
Eric Sivertson recently discussed field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, onThe Robot ReportPodcast, Episode 260.
The vice president of the security business atLattice Semiconductordiscussed how FPGAs are a critical component in security for robots. The conversation examined some of the security risk vectors and how FPGAs can help to lock down the system.
Where we are with physicalAIand robotics today?
Sivertson:This is a good question, and I like to usehumanoidsas the standard-bearer of this intersection of AI and the physical world. You can look at robot [arms] too, but humanoids really highlight this situation. I like to say that you can’t trust a humanoid if it’s not both safe and secure.
This is really the big paradigm shift that’s about to hit this industry. If you look at robots today, a lot ofrobots are in a cage,or they’re locked to the floor. So they have limited mobility.
When you get to a humanoid, some robots fall in this category too. You can think of aTesla asreally a rolling robot. So when you think about these intersections of what I would call cyber with the physical world, another term that’s used is “cyber-physical systems.” The humanoid is an easy one for people to wrap their heads around because it really is this intersection of AI and the physical world.
And that’s why I say it needs to be bothsafe and secure. In other words, if it follows the typical safety paradigm that it does certain functions within its limits, that’s good. You have to have that.
We want the humanoid to be able to detect the force properly and have a way to stop when it might be going to bump into a human, and have some guardrails to keep it from doing bad behavior.
But because it’s typically run by multiple differentcomponents— some are software-based, some are FPGAs or hardware-based, or ASICs, particularly those that are programmable — now the security part kicks in because it’s very easy for bad guys now to come in and attack that software structure.
So you’ve built all the safety parameters, but if someone can go in now and adjust the data set that those safety parameters are using to make decisions, it’s not really safe anymore because this now could be used for bad purposes. So I think when you have acyberattackon infrastructure today, everyone thinks about my system going down, I lose my ransomware, I lose my data, I get locked out. I mean, that’s not a good thing.
But imagine now there are a thousand humanoids working in a particular area, and they all get hacked, and now they start doing really bad behavior. And they’re moving 50- to 100-kg things around, and now they turn into weapons.