A Safety Model for Collaborative Robots (SCOR)

Purpose and goal

The objective to develop a generic safety model led to a conceptual design for an IT-tool consisting of 100+ safety questions to be answered and a speed limit guiding strategy. The tool is primarily meant to be used in pre-studies to support evaluation of collaborative solutions and tells developers in “what direction to assess” safety in more detail. The tool has a modular organization and safety questions can be added and removed depending on context and companies existing assessment methods and the approach was tested for one of the demo-installations within the ToMM-project.

Expected results and effects

The project has generated insights regarding the complex and dynamic nature of collaborative safety considerations, and how to take advantage of these insights to guide companies as they are making efforts to install and safely operate robots in collaborative settings. In addition to supporting the ToMM demo installation the guiding approach has also been tested for a commercial installation of a robot at Torslanda, indicating that the project also has contributed to the desired long-term goal of increased installation rate of safe and productive collaborative solutions.

Planned approach and implementation

The insight that there are no “collaborative robots”, only “collaborative settings” had a significant impact on the project, making safety models for “applications” the relevant objective. The identified scope of collaborative system complexity indicated that attempts to generate “static” models that can “calculate” a global optimum for safe collaborative system design is impractical, and the project shifted focus to developing “guiding” models, that can support developers that rely on experience when iteratively “searching” for safe and productive solutions.