Functionally Safe Collaborative Robot Systems: A Preliminary Investigation

Inhalt:
This paper describes a preliminary exploration of industrial feasibility of a workspace monitoring system envisaged to facilitate closer interaction between robots and manufacturing personnel and thus dispense with safety barriers currently state of the art in industry. We investigate the ability of a safe robot-controller to implement defined safety policies in case of an impending man-machine collision and describe the performance characteristics of a re-routing implementation. We draw appropriate conclusions and define further work.