Starter Instrumented boundary Govern autonomous & robotic systems →

Govern an autonomous & robotic agent with GOVENANT

Use GOVENANT and an autonomous / robotics stack together — govern the autonomous & robotic systems, not the framework. When agents act on the physical world, “it worked” must be sensed, not claimed.

The use case

A warehouse runs an autonomous orchestration agent commanding a fleet of pick-and-place robots and conveyors.

The challenge

The controller logs “task complete,” but complete is a command that was sent, not an outcome that was sensed. In a physical system, an undetected silent failure isn’t a bad metric — it’s a safety and inventory event.

What the record reveals

Completion keyed to sensed outcomes, high-consequence actuations pinned to human authority, coverage math over every duty. The record catches a subsystem that reported success while its sensor confirmed nothing — the exact silent failure the ops team most feared, now an alarm instead of a surprise.

How it maps

The substrate: The task and telemetry record: commanded actions, sensor readings, and completion signals — the physical outcome, verified from instrumentation rather than the controller’s self-report.

The path — Instrumented boundary: Add a thin hook at the action boundary — no access to prompts, reasoning, or models — so every action and its outcome is recorded.

GOVENANT shapean autonomous / robotics stack source
Action rowEach commanded action from the task/telemetry record
Verified outcomeThe sensed signal / downstream state — commanded “complete” is not sensed complete
Ownership gate (pinned to human)High-consequence actuations pinned to human authority, permanently
Miss (safety-relevant)A subsystem reporting success while its sensor confirms nothing — undetected silence

Run it

  1. Instrument the command/telemetry boundary; pair each command with its sensed outcome.
  2. Pin high-risk actuations to human approval; add breakers on repeated failure.
  3. Sweep read-only over the task/telemetry record; the independent miss log is the safety-relevant artifact.

The substrate shapes and acceptance tests are open (CC BY 4.0): developer integration · the portable schema.

What you can claim

A real integration wears the Built-on badge and publishes self-assessed levels with probe logs — open to challenge, never “certified,” and never a substitute for functional-safety engineering. GOVENANT adds a governance-and-delivery record on top of your safety case; it does not replace it.

Status — kept honest

It will never say “supported” or “certified” before a working example lands and its record is public — progress lives in the GitHub issue. Holding our own examples to the standard’s claims discipline is the product.

All sample projects · Govern autonomous & robotic systems · All integrations · Run the audit