Dynamic Safety Distance Determination for Human Robot Coexistence in Industrial Applications

Abstract

Abstract The coexistence of humans and robots in manufacturing requires safety. Typically, safety functionalities for coexistence are based on speed and separation monitoring according to EN ISO 10218. Thereby, a robot should reduce speed or stop completely when an obstacle is too close to avoid collisions. Nowadays, despite this standard, speed and separation monitoring are still realized with static worst-case safety assumptions about the kinematics of humans and robots. Over the years, different static techniques have evolved in the industrial environment like fences, light fences, or camera-based systems where critical zones can be configured. The latter is admittedly more flexible in the configuration but still static during the run-time of the manufacturing system. The static worst-case assumptions result in large unnecessary distances between humans and robots, which leads to inefficient use of space. Therefore, factories are larger than they need to be, which leads to higher costs. This work aims to enhance the use of space in human-robot coexistence applications to make factory layouts more efficient. Therefore, a dynamic minimum distance calculation based on the DIN ISO 15066 with the kinematic information of the coexisting human and industrial robots is provided. It is shown in a simulation that this approach of a dynamic safety distance calculation leads to a reduction of the required space.