Risk Assessment in Collaborative Robotics

Problems and Objectives. In Human-Robot Collaborative (HRC) applications, operators and robots work in a common space. Their close interactions increase the likelihood of direct physical contacts either due to the intrinsics of the operations (e.g., tools, motions, etc) or behavior of the operator (e.g., mistakes, misuses, instruction misunderstanding, etc). Unintended physical contacts may lead to hazardous situations for the operator. In order to identify and avoid such situations as far as possible, we need to define and develop a comprehensive approach for safety assessment of HRC applications, that includes: