Safety of Human-Robot Collaboration Systems Project

Safe human-robot collaboration is widely seen as key to the future of robotics. When humans and robots can work together in the same space, a whole class of tasks becomes amenable to automation, ranging from collaborative assembly to parts and material handling and delivery. Keeping humans safe requires the ability to monitor the work area and ensure that automation equipment is aware of potential danger soon enough to avoid it. Work on this project will address the following objectives:

1. Develop the safety standards and performance measures to enable humans and robots to work together in the same space.
2. Develop performance measures for sensors used to monitor the work area and ensure safety of robots, vehicles, and people.

To develop and deploy the measurement science needed by industry (manufacturers, integrators and end-users) and robot safety standards organizations to enable safety and effectiveness of human robot collaborative activities by 2014.

Robots are under development throughout the world that will revolutionize manufacturing by allowing humans and robots to operate in close proximity while performing a variety of tasks. The ISO 10218 robot safety standard working group is in the process of defining the safety requirements for collaborative robots. These robots will use advanced sensors to detect human positions and adjust their speed based on the separation distance between the human and the robot. Ensuring these robots operate in a safe manner will require new guidelines, performance measurement methods and validation procedures that this project will address. The project will also participate in work under way to harmonize the RIA/ANSI R15.06 standard with the ISO 10218 standard to ensure adoption by U.S. industry

First, a technical specification (ISO TS 15066) providing the guidelines for the safe operation of collaborative robots will be developed as a precursor to the final standard (NIST is taking the lead, with the German ISO members, in this task). To support preparation of the TS, members of this project will work with stakeholders to identify the key attributes of the collaborative robot and the necessary safety guidelines. These attributes and guidelines will be implemented as vendor-neutral prototypes on a robot testbed at NIST. The results will be fed into the TS document and submitted to the standards committee for comment and an eventual vote for adoption.

The measurement sciences aspect of this project will focus on several key research areas frequently mentioned as critical needs for enabling deployment of collaborative robots. The project will propose and evaluate a methodology consisting of metrics and procedures for measuring the safety performance of a collaborative system. This will provide the guidelines for measuring the level of safety achieved by a particular application of safeguards. Quantifying safety in collaborative operations is a critical measure needed by industry and is a complex and difficult area of research. Manufacturing goals to improve productivity, agility and flexibility must be balanced against worker safety. A project goal will be to define metrics for expressing the relationship between safety and productivity. Related to this research topic is measuring the performance of human detection systems, which will support overall safety measurements and will provide a means to compare human detection systems.

Outcome: Submitted a revised draft of speed and position monitoring guidelines for ISO TS 15066. This was done jointly with German ISO representatives. The draft was presented for review at the ISO TC 184/SC 2/WG 3 Industrial Safety meeting in London on June 6, 2011.

Output: Developed a prototype safety system implementing speed and separation monitoring guidelines on the robot testbed in the NIST shops. The prototype uses laser scanners to measure the position and speed of a human, to pause the robot according to the guidelines in the technical specification, and to resume robot operation when appropriate. Various experiments provided insights that led to improvements in the TS.

The work supports ISO TC 184/SC 2/WG 3 Industrial Safety and ANSI/Robotic Industries Association (RIA) 15.06. RIA's goal is to adopt the ISO standards with additions for the U.S. markets.

• ISO/RIA 10218-1 Safety Requirements – Part 1: Robot
•  ISO/RIA 10218-2 Safety Requirements – Part 2: Industrial robot systems and integration
• ISO/RIA TS 15066 Robots and robotic devices – Collaborative Robots