Run-time Safety Framework for Component-based Medical Robots

As modern medical robot systems are required to perform complex surgical tasks with various sensing and actuation capabilities, it is becoming more important to integrate a variety of sensors, actuators, and control loops into a single system. However, the consideration of nonfunctional properties such as performance and fault tolerance complicates the integration and makes it harder to achieve system safety. In medical robotics, such system issues have not received much attention despite a consensus on the importance of safety within the domain. As our approach to this issue, we present a run-time software environment for safety research on component-based medical robot systems, called the Safety Framework. This framework aims to provide systematic safety methods by decomposing safety features into reusable safety mechanisms and safety specifications. This decomposition enables the accumulation of safety experience and knowledge in a traceable manner, and provides reusable safety design guidelines for designing new medical robot systems.