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.
Modern manufacturing systems are increasingly characterized by using of complex machines, tools and electronics components. Especially a proportion of electronics and software has increased steadily in recent years. Challenge of this progression is the complexity of manufacturing systems during designing, integrating and operating. Based on a product lifecycle -PL-this article introduces an integrated method for system design, which supports engineering and management of safety/security for digital manufacturing systems. This method was practically established during a planning and implementation of digital manufacturing system at the university of applied sciences "Technikum Wien". The outcomes of this methodintegrated safety and security (ISS) -ought to help the factory designers, integrators and users for (re)designing, operating and maintaining of machines, robots as far work-cells. The future work is to build simple software tool to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for decision making during evaluation of risk assessment and management.
Experiences in applying results from ECOLEAD on Collaborative Networked Organisations (CNOs) in real life have shown that the maturity level of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), who joined these networks, are highly different. Soon it was found out that there are different process areas in which SMTEs have strengths and weaknesses. This paper will introduce the essential process areas which should be assessed by standardised and well established assessment methods to be able to establish improvement programs out of the results. The process areas and the assessment methodology are derived from CMMI, which is nowadays the prevailing assessment method in the software development area. Typical tourism domain specific process areas are Quality Management, Yield Management, Human Resource Management, Product Development, and eCommerce. While classical process areas of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integrated) will be analyzed insofar, if they are appropriate for CNOs and how they should be extended or modified.
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