Standards & Compliance
Steady Eddie systems are engineered against the international machinery-safety standards that govern autonomous and driverless industrial equipment, and every order completes the conformity route for its destination market before it ships. This page sets out the standards frame, the market-by-market routes, and what you as the operator remain responsible for.
This page is general guidance on our standards and conformity programme. It describes the standards the system is engineered against and the conformity route for each market — it does not claim a certification or marking for your specific order. The formal conformity position for your product, machine and destination is confirmed on quotation and completed per order before shipment.
Engineered against the machinery-safety canon.
Machinery safety is not improvised — there is an established body of international standards for exactly this class of system, and Steady Eddie's engineering is built against it. These are the design references behind every product's risk assessment file and safety architecture: what each one governs, and why it matters to you as a buyer.
Risk Assessment & Risk Reduction
The foundation standard for machinery safety: identify every hazard, estimate the risk, and design it out in a documented, auditable order. Every completed SE-X engineering release carries a risk assessment file built on this method — the document your own safety people will ask for first.
Safety-Related Control Performance
Governs the parts of a control system that perform safety functions — emergency stops, protective stops, interlocks — and how their reliability is specified and validated. It is the benchmark for the independence and integrity of Eddie's safety layer and its veto.
Driverless Industrial Trucks
The safety standard for driverless industrial trucks and their systems — the reference frame for Eddie on forklifts, tow applications and terminal tractors, covering protective devices, speed and load handling without an onboard driver.
Autonomous Earth-Moving Machinery
Safety requirements for autonomous and semi-autonomous machine systems in earth-moving and mining — the governing reference for Eddie on excavators, loaders, dozers and compactors, including operating zones and supervisor interaction.
US Driverless Vehicle Standard
The American national standard for driverless, automatic guided industrial vehicles — the recognised reference a US safety officer will hold an unmanned truck application against, alongside OSHA's workplace rules.
Canadian Standards
The home-market frame: CSA standards for the safeguarding of machinery and for lift-truck safety govern how industrial equipment is guarded, operated and maintained in Canada, and sit behind provincial OH&S enforcement on every Canadian site.
Language matters here, so we use it precisely: these are the standards the system is engineered against — the design references and verification benchmarks for every product. Where a market requires third-party conformity assessment, that assessment is completed per order, per market, before shipment.
No integration is a compliance position, not just an engineering one.
Eddie never integrates electronically with the host machine — no CAN bus, no ECU, no firmware, ever. It works the machine the way a trained operator does: through the joysticks, levers and pedals the manufacturer designed, tested and certified. That architecture does real compliance work for you.
Because nothing reads or writes the machine's electronics, the OEM's own safety systems, interlocks, limits and certifications remain intact and remain primary. The machine's braking, hydraulic limits and protective functions behave exactly as its manufacturer built and certified them to behave. A conformity assessment of an Eddie retrofit therefore has a clean boundary: the Eddie system on one side, an unmodified certified machine on the other.
Said carefully: reduced integration risk, not a legal shield
We make this argument precisely, because it is worth making precisely. Not integrating with the machine removes an entire category of conformity risk — no modified control system to re-certify, no OEM software to assess, no warranty-voiding electronic change. It does not exempt the combined installation from machinery law. Adding an autonomy system to a machine still requires its own risk assessment and, in each market, its own conformity route — and that is exactly what our per-order programme delivers.
One system. A confirmed route into every market.
Machinery conformity is national, not global — the same kit meets a different legal frame in Toronto, Texas, Tilburg and Townsville. So conformity is run as programme discipline: for every order, the route for the destination market is confirmed at quotation and completed before the kit ships into that market, including third-party assessment where the market requires it.
| Market | What applies | Conformity route |
|---|---|---|
| Canada | CSA standards for machinery safeguarding and lift-truck safety; provincial OH&S regulation governs the equipment in use on site. | Home market. Conformance documentation and the product's risk assessment file are supplied with every order, aligned to the destination province's OH&S regime. |
| United States | OSHA workplace regulation, with ANSI consensus standards — including ANSI/ITSDF B56.5 for driverless industrial vehicles — as the recognised technical reference. | Supplier conformity documentation against the applicable ANSI/ISO references, confirmed and completed per order before shipment. |
| European Union | Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230. The CE route: conformity assessment, technical file, EU declaration of conformity and CE marking before placing on the EU market. | The CE route is completed per order for EU-destined shipments, with third-party (notified body) involvement where the Regulation requires it — before the kit enters the market. |
| United Kingdom | UK machinery-supply law, with the UKCA route mirroring the EU structure: technical file, declaration of conformity and marking. | The UKCA route is completed per order for UK-destined shipments before the kit enters the market. |
| Australia / NZ | Work health and safety law and plant-safety regulation, with AS/NZS and adopted ISO standards as the technical reference for supplied plant. | Plant-safety conformance documentation against the applicable references, confirmed and completed per order before shipment. |
| Other markets | Whatever the destination's machinery-safety and import-conformity regime requires — assessed at enquiry. | The route is identified at quotation and completed per order before shipment. If a market's requirements cannot be met, we say so before you commit — not after. |
Shipping paperwork, origin and duty treatment for each of these markets are covered on the Shipping & Export page.
AI plans. Rules govern. Humans authorize. Safety has veto.
That sentence is the authority hierarchy of every Steady Eddie system, and it is a compliance property, not a slogan. Planning proposes; a rule envelope constrains what may be proposed; a human explicitly authorises what runs; and an independent safety layer can stop everything, at any time, regardless of what the rest of the system wants. The full architecture is on the Technology page.
Autonomy itself is staged the same way — a controlled progression, never a switch. Each rung of the ladder is held only after validation on the specific machine and an explicit human authorisation, and every rung runs inside the same rule envelope with the same safety veto.
Instrumented Machine
Eddie is docked and engaged, perception is live, and every control input and machine response is measured and logged while a human retains full command. Every installation begins here: the machine is characterised before it is ever commanded.
Remote Operation
An authorized remote operator works the machine through Eddie's actuators, from a safe distance, on the machine's own controls — inside the same rule envelope and safety architecture every higher rung inherits.
Increasing Machine Initiative
From supervised task execution to exception-supervised autonomy. Each rung is earned the same way — validation on the specific machine, then an explicit human authorisation — and no rung is ever reached by flipping a switch. A machine holds only the rung it has earned.
What arrives with the kit.
A compliance position is only as good as its documentation, so every product ships with the complete file — the same discipline you can see across the engineering pages of this site, delivered as the paperwork your safety officer, insurer and regulator will actually read.
Engineering Drawing Set
The dimensioned drawings for the product's dock, fit kit and actuator assemblies — the documents a machine shop builds from and an inspector checks against.
Harness Documentation
Wire-by-wire documentation of the Eddie-side harness set — power, sensing and E-stop network. All of it internal to the Eddie system; none of it touches the machine's electrics.
Install, Commission & Operate Manual
The written procedure from dock mounting through control-map checks to daily operation — written for the crew that will do the work, not for a filing cabinet.
Risk Assessment File
The product's hazard identification and risk-reduction record, built on the ISO 12100 method — the backbone of the conformity file in every market.
Declaration Documents per Market
The declaration and conformance documents the destination market requires — prepared per order as part of the conformity route, and shipped with the kit.
Commissioning Record
The signed record of the install survey and commissioning checks for your specific machine — the document that closes the loop between the engineering file and the machine in your yard.
What the operator remains responsible for.
A retrofit autonomy system does not take over your safety obligations — it joins them. Deploying Eddie on a working site sits inside your existing health-and-safety system, and the following stay squarely on your side of the line.
The Human-Start Rule
Every session begins the way it always has: with the operator. A human walks around the machine, completes their own pre-start inspection, starts it themselves and clears it for operation. Only after that — engine running, inspection done, clearance given — does Eddie engage the controls. This is a mandatory rule on every package in the catalogue, not a configurable option.
Trained, Authorised People
Supervisors and crews trained on the system before it runs, with authorisation to command a mission held by named, credentialed people — not by whoever is nearest.
Site Risk Assessment
Your own assessment of the specific site, task and machine combination — traffic, ground, people and simultaneous operations — before each deployment, as your OH&S system already requires for new plant.
Exclusion Zones
Defined, enforced operating areas for autonomous work — physical demarcation, access control and the discipline to keep people out of the machine's working envelope while a mission runs.
Local Regulatory Compliance
Compliance with the workplace, licensing and notification rules of your jurisdiction and industry — the requirements that attach to your site and your operation, which no supplier can hold for you.
Tell us the machine and the market.
The conformity route for your destination is confirmed on quotation, alongside freight and commercial terms. If your safety, legal or insurance people have questions, bring them — this is the conversation we are built for.