ROBO-PARTNER Safety Strategy

ROBO-PARTNER Safety Strategy

Current manufacturing practices require complete physical separation between people and active industrial robots as precautions to ensure safety. Currently only few industrial solutions can be used to offer some sort of fenceless operation¹, but a lot more are in an embryonic stage and not close to industrial application^{2, 3}.

ROBO-PARTNER project aspires to provide a fenceless intrinsic safety system, considering the robots’ dynamic power, static force, speed etc. as well as the human’s reflex actions by ensuring protective safety levels (such as safety working areas for the operators) including cameras, ultrasonic or laser range sensors, thermal imagine devises, capacitive robot skins etc.The most important aspects to be addressed involve:

• crash safety,
• active safety and
• adaptive safety.

Additionally, a great challenge to be resolved is the conformance and certification against EU legislations and standards (e.g. ISO, DIN etc.). Risk assessment will be performed focusing on Human Robot Interaction aiming to the:

• Compliance of the scenarios with the applicable regulations and standards
• Identification and evaluation of the risks presented in each scenario of ROBO-PARTNER pilot cases
• Measurements for risk reduction and
• Detection of the aspects of these scenarios that are not compliant with the standards