NOD G-1, a safety node for the road
The road needs a voice that doesn't depend on the cloud.
Meet the NOD G-1. It is a local, edge-computed safety node that watches the asphalt, sees what vehicles cannot, and triggers a physical safety stop in milliseconds. It works completely offline, without a network connection, and without capturing a single face.
What happens in a second and a half
1,500 ms. A human driver is only now moving a foot toward the brake.
at 45 mph the vehicle has moved 30.2 mabout 99 ft
Scroll to run the clock. The human and cloud figures are typical values from the sources on this page. The 50 ms figure is our design target and has not been measured yet.
What NOD G-1 is
One node on the pole. A ceiling above the vehicle's own software.
NOD G-1 is a safety interlock tied to hardware that is designed for managing kinetic energy and preventing any mishaps involving industry, vehicles, and mechanical devices. Rather than using braking technology in a reactive manner, NOD G-1 uses a predictive safety threshold, integrating ultra-wideband sensor arrays and human physiology telemetry.
The device directly interfaces with vehicle telemetry through the V2X connection, providing an indecisive autonomous system with the outside confirmation it requires to avoid paralysis.
Absolute isolation. Zero AI guesswork.
We separate perception from reflex by design. Heavy AI compute processes the scene on an NVIDIA Jetson, but the final safety trigger travels over raw copper directly to a hardware microcontroller. No cloud latency. No software crash can disable the stop. If the health ping stops, the system defaults to safe.
- Radar to reflex board to output, over copper. Under 50 ms is the target.
- The compute module sends a heartbeat ten times a second. If it goes quiet for 200 ms, the node goes to its safe state on its own.
- Every encounter generates a validated edge record, delivering the forensic baseline required for accurate accident reconstruction.
- Sealed enclosure. Pole-mount, weather-resistant housing.
- Battery and charging. LiFePO₄ reserve with mains charging, design target.
- Edge compute. NVIDIA Jetson, classifying beside the reflex, never inside it.
- Reflex board. Safety microcontroller and wired safety output.
- 60 GHz radar. Sees range, speed and shape, never a face.
The rules we keep
Four rules, kept in hardware.
These decide everything else about the design. If a new idea breaks one of them, the idea changes, not the rule.
Safety runs on wires, not radio.
The fast stop happens inside the node over copper. Radar, then the reflex board, then the output. No radio sits anywhere in that path.
Radio can only stop things, never start them.
A message over the air can say stop or hold. It can never say go, raise a limit, or switch the safety off. Only the local wired check can release.
Nobody's movements leave the pole.
What goes out is a zone number, a type such as person or bike or car, a count, and a receipt. Never one person's path. Never anyone's exact position.
Every link has a heartbeat.
Every connection has a pulse, and the node already knows what to do when one goes quiet. Silence shows up as silence on the dashboard, never as a blank.
Where it stands
The same node, three places it can stand.
One reflex, tuned to the place it is mounted. Pick a scene.
At the crossing
The node watches the crosswalk and the lanes that feed it. When a person steps out, it asks the signal to hold and tells approaching vehicles to stop.
- Works with the traffic cabinet the city already has, through a plain relay contact.
- Vision Zero crossings, school zones, and streets shared with bikes and scooters.
- Sees people and bikes. Never who they are.
On the corridor
On a highway node the same reflex watches for stopped vehicles and debris, and warns traffic upstream in weather that blinds a camera.
- Stopped vehicle and blocked lane warnings, kilometers ahead.
- Works in rain, fog, spray, and the dark.
- Speaks to vehicles over V2X where the road authority runs it.
When the grid goes down
The node runs on its own battery. It keeps sensing, keeps writing receipts, and can still speak to vehicles and to emergency channels.
- Runs on battery when mains power fails.
- Messages sized to travel over VHF and UHF emergency channels.
- Forward warning to approaching vehicles while the network is down.
Why 60 GHz
Physics built a fence. We used it.
Why 60 GHz? Because oxygen absorption naturally attenuates the signal, keeping your data local to the pole. Combined with a massive 7 GHz sweep bandwidth, it resolves objects down to about 2 cm. That is surgical precision to tell a pedestrian from a piece of road debris, and privacy by physics: it sees range, speed, and shape, but never a face. Drag the slider to see what the sweep does.
The return shows two objects. A person and the debris beside them stay separate.
Range resolution from sweep bandwidth, and oxygen absorption at sea level.
Fine enough to tell a person from debris
The 57 to 64 GHz band allows up to 7 GHz of continuous sweep. Detail improves as the sweep widens, so the node can resolve about 2 cm. That is enough to keep a person standing beside a car separate from the car.
A bubble with a natural edge
Oxygen absorbs energy near 60 GHz. The return fades past the crossing, so the node reads its own corner and ignores the rest of the street. The band is unlicensed under FCC Part 15.255, so the node itself needs no spectrum license to sense.
The cars already on the road
Modern autonomy relies on perception. We provide the ground truth.
V2X lets vehicles perceive environmental context beyond line of sight. While next-generation platforms adopt connected channels and autonomous stacks guard their perimeters, existing fleets need a simple bridge. We provide the environmental truth vehicles need to make safe stops, from diagnostic-port fleet adapters to roadside perception broadcasts.
Every car and light truck since 1996. Speed, braking, and engine data are already there.
Reads the vehicle, gives it an ear for the road, and adds a driver readiness check in the cab.
The channel new vehicles use. The roadside license belongs to the road authority, so we integrate with it.
Hears the vehicle, watches the crossing, and can say stop.
Manufacturers moving toward V2X on new vehicles
What people are saying
The intelligence belongs on the road.
“Reactive AV safety built on machine learning is unsustainable. Proactive safety must be embedded in road infrastructure.”
Ricky Kwok, as featured in Frenus, Best of LinkedIn, Future Mobility and Market Evolution, CW 23/24“Vehicles from different manufacturers need to communicate not only with each other but with infrastructure and pedestrians.”
Federal Highway Administration, cooperative driving automation“Autonomy will never scale commercially as long as liability is trapped inside a vehicle-isolated stack.”
Dr. Priyalatha, Lead, Automotive Communications and Networking“An ingenious invention that promises to advance AV technology and the overall safety of everyone.”
Julian Wong, writer for Eurekascoop, on the Sovereign Spine
Featured, June 15, 2026
Ricky Kwok's post was selected as a strategic insight in Frenus, Best of LinkedIn, Future Mobility and Market Evolution, CW 23/24.
Built on Texas Instruments 60 GHz radar and NVIDIA Jetson edge compute. NVIDIA Inception member since June 2026.
Talk to us
Tell us what you are working on.
A city crossing, a fleet, a fireground, a port. If people and machines share the space, we would like to hear about it. The founding team reads every message.