Different Safety Certifiable Concepts for Mobile Robots in Industrial Environments

Abstract

Recent progress in mobile robotics paves the way of their usage in industrial environments. Nevertheless, they are currently no standards, which provide safety regulation in these environments for autonomous mobile robots. In this paper, three different safety concepts for mobile robots will be discussed, whereby the safe usage of a mobile robot in an industrial setting should be ensured. The first concept contains a safety ring, which allows the mobile robot to use probabilistic robotics in combination with a robust obstacle avoidance and safe hazard detection. Further, the second concept treats safe navigation without probabilistic robotics. The priority hereby lies on the self-localisation with reliable sensor methods. And in the third concept, an aware environment with object detection and tracking is shown. Virtual sensors in form of wireless sensor networks placed in the factory replace the need of physical sensors on mobile robots. The outline of this work is a theoretical comparison of these three safety concepts in consideration of their specific properties and their recommended usage for different scenarios.