Meeting New Challenges and Possibilities with Modern Robot Safety Technologies

In recent years, human-robot co-operation has been of increasing interest in research, and new types of modern safety technology have emerged on the market. These include safety sensors, machine vision based safety systems, laser sensors and safety controllers for robots. The new technology enables flexible fenceless safety systems and dynamic safety regions alongside a host of other attractive features for human-robot co-operation. The safety systems can also be integrated into a transferable robotic platform. While this modern technology opens up wholly new possibilities, it also creates new and fairly complex challenges in safety design. This paper introduces some case examples of handling these challenges.