Palm Garden AI develops Coherence Guard relational decision layer for human-facing robots
NVIDIA Corp. — coherence Guard is designed to enable service robots to behave appropriately around people, says Palm Garden AI. Palm Garden AI is developing Coherence Guard, which it described as a “platform-agnostic relational decision layer for human-facing robots.” “The aim is not to replace perception, motion planning, reinforcement learning, or existing robot control stacks,” said Joachim Scheuerer, CEO of Palm Garden AI.
“Rather, it functions as an additional pre-action evaluation layer: Before a robot executes an action, the layer can evaluate whether the action is relationally coherent in a real human environment.” “This includes signals such as timing, proximity, boundary requests, emotional tone, trust preservation, respectful withdrawal, and the difference between technically possible action and socially appropriate action,” he added. “As humanoids move toward hospitality, care, retail, education, guidance, and domestic environments, we believe this may become a necessary infrastructure category.” Palm Garden AI, which has offices in Germany and Thailand, has built its ANATTA 9 behavior infrastructure on the Transwarp Cloud Operating System (TCOS). The company said Coherence Guard is designed to sit above or beside existing robot control, SDK/API, ROS 2, planning, or world-model systems. While physical world models help AI systems understand objects, space, and movement, Palm Garden said its Relational Infrastructure Framework (RIF) adds an understanding of roles, intentions, vulnerabilities, and possible future consequences. The technology can evaluate human expressions and guide coherent actions, such as withdrawing if a person indicates discomfort. The RIF Relational Infrastructure Framework is now available upon request from Palm Garden. Palm Garden AI adds a layer to robot understanding Scheuerer replied to the following questions from The Robot Report: How did you identify the need or gap in current service robot capabilities? Scheuerer: We saw the gap from two directions. First, many current service robots are already becoming capable in navigation, speech, perception, task execution and expressive interaction. Joachim Scheurer, CEO of Palm Garden AI. Second, our work at Palm Garden Retreat in Thailand exposed us to many real-world human interaction situations: arrival, orientation, guidance, silence, vulnerability, trust-building, misunderstanding and respectful withdrawal. These are situations where a technically correct action can still feel wrong if timing, distance, tone or context are not coherent. Coherence Guard was developed to address this missing layer — not replacing robot control, but evaluating whether a proposed action is relationally appropriate before or during execution. Do you have base behaviors based on your observations of human interactions? Scheuerer: Yes.
