Hardware Safety Policy
Hardware and peripheral control must be explicit, bounded, and auditable.
Defaults
Default mode:
Discovery may list host-exposed devices and capabilities. It must not perform
control actions.
Consent Requirements
Always require explicit consent for:
- camera capture
- microphone capture
- screen capture
- printing
- serial writes
- GPIO writes
- actuator or robot motion
- any action that affects another person, device, account, or environment
Safe Action Classes
Read-only actions:
- list devices
- list host tools
- list printers without printing
- list audio sinks/sources without recording
- list camera device nodes without opening streams
- list display/session metadata
Reversible local actions:
- set volume
- select default output
- mute/unmute
Physical or external actions:
- print
- capture camera/microphone data
- write to serial/GPIO
- move robot or actuator
- enable/disable monitors or display outputs
- send commands to robot arms, legs, grippers, tools, wheels, or drones
Physical or external actions require stronger policy, logging, and often human
confirmation.
Hardware connectors may produce input artifacts or perform output actions.
Examples:
- screen capture -> image artifact under
md-os/ops/local/hardware/screenshots/
- camera look-once -> image artifact under host-local hardware cache
- microphone sample -> audio artifact under host-local hardware cache
- serial read -> text or binary artifact under host-local hardware cache
- volume set -> host-local action log entry
- robot motion command -> host-local action log entry plus controller response
Artifacts that reveal the local machine or environment are not portable state.
They must remain cleanable with cortex hardware clean.
Robot And Actuator Policy
Robot arms, legs, grippers, wheels, drones, and actuator systems require:
- a dedicated connector for the controller substrate
- explicit target device selection
- bounded speed, force, range, and duration limits
- dry-run or simulation support where possible
- stop and emergency-stop commands
- controller feedback logging
- no autonomous motion loop unless an external safety/runtime layer owns it
Audit Requirements
Every hardware action connector should write:
- requested natural-language intent
- selected device
- selected connector
- policy decision
- timestamp
- host command/API used
- result
- error output if any
Audit records should live under:
md-os/ops/local/hardware/actions.ndjson
Discovery records should live under:
md-os/ops/local/hardware/observations.ndjson
The hardware directory is host-local and cleanable with cortex hardware clean.