Hazard Identification and Safety Assessment of Human-Robot Systems

Abstract

This chapter aims to develop a systematic methodology for safety improvements of human-robot systems at present and for the future. It reviews typical industrial incidents caused by robots. The chapter considers the human-robot system, and enumerates possible hazards as a subset. Two typical hazards, ie., human struck by robot body and human struck by robot arm, are targeted, and logic models as a general purpose fault tree are constructed. It introduces a character analysis and analyzes hazard causation mechanisms for a general human-machine system. The chapter outlines safety assessment procedures which are consistent with the probabilistic risk assessment procedures typically used for systems in the nuclear, chemical, and aerospace industries. It also outlines phased mission analysis for installation, startup, test, instruction, operation, maintenance, etc., and generates minimal cut sets of the fault trees for typical phases. The chapter assesses a realistic human-robot system quantitatively by a computer program based on a version of kinetic tree theory.