An Approach to Designing Software Safety Systems for Rehabilitation Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a system-level approach to the design of a safety-critical robotic system that is sufficiently safe to satisfy human-subject safety criteria. This system design approach utilizes preliminary hazard analysis, and fault tree analysis, and was successfully applied to a dexterous space robot designed to fly on NASA's space shuttle. An application of this approach to a shoulder rehabilitation exoskeleton would be presented and shown to improve the safety of the overall system.