Different Safety Certifiable Concepts for Mobile Robots in Industrial Environments

Abstract

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.

Phollower—The Universal Autonomous Mobile Robot for Industry and Civil Environments with COVID-19 Germicide Addon Meeting Safety Requirements

“…Three different safety concepts were proposed and discussed in [6] to design a safe environment for indoor AMRs. They include the safety ring for reliable object detection, safe navigation, and environmental awareness.…”

“…They include the safety ring for reliable object detection, safe navigation, and environmental awareness. However, not all proposed concepts for MiR100 [6] have been implemented, and their mutual evaluation is still missing. For [7], safe and robust movement in a complex 3D environment, scenarios were obtained by the combination of variable step-size rapidly exploring random-tree (RRT) method for global path planning together with the local planner for safe path optimization.…”

“…In this way, a 360 • continuous protective safety field was secured without any blind angles. A similar approach was used in [6]. Both scanners are fixed directly to the robot's structure and protected by the top cover plate, while only the scanning part of the scanner remains unprotected.…”

Integrated System of Industrial Safety and Labor Protection

“…However, at the moment there are no standards to ensure safety when using mobile robotic systems. In [3], a comparison was made of three basic concepts ensuring the safety of mobile robots in production conditions. The first concept contains a protective ring that allows the mobile robot to use probabilistic robotics in combination with hazard detection sensors.…”

“…In modern industrial conditions, the use of autonomous mobile robots is very common and the article [4] shows how to design and implement mobile robotic systems that can ensure labor safety in a complex industrial environment. The task was completed in three stages.…”