Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COVR (Being safe around collaborative and versatile robots in shared spaces)
Teaser
The need for collaboration with robots on human tasks is evident in all sectors of the European market. Collaboration always raises safety issues, and European legislation is very careful to promote the protection of workers, elderly and weak subjects as a top priority. The...
Summary
The need for collaboration with robots on human tasks is evident in all sectors of the European market. Collaboration always raises safety issues, and European legislation is very careful to promote the protection of workers, elderly and weak subjects as a top priority. The need for “certificationâ€, i.e. the compliance with mandatory requirements of Safety and Health, are in fact perceived as a pressing need by market operators (manufacturers, end users, etc.).
Safety regulations will be a barrier to cobot deployment unless they are easy to access, understand and apply. COVR collates existing safety regulations relating to cobots in e.g. manufacturing and fills in regulatory gaps for newer cobot fields as rehabilitation to present detailed safety assessment instructions to coboteers. Making the safety assessment process clearer allows cobots to be used with more confidence in more situations, increasing the variety of cobots on the market and the variety of services cobots can offer to the general population.
COVR provides a one-stop shop which uses a common approach to safety assessment and is valid across all fields and applications. COVR will provide clear and simple online access to best-practice safety testing protocols via a user-friendly decision tree, guided by questions about the cobot and its intended behaviors. Resulting application-specific testing protocols specify how to assess safety and document compliance with regulations. We support coboteers by providing safety-relevant services based in well-equipped facilities at each partner site. COVR services cover all stages of cobot development from design through final system sign-off to safety in use and maintenance, provided through consultancy, risk analysis, actual testing, workshops, courses, demonstrations, etc. – all designed to inspire people to increase cobot safety. All COVR elements will be beta-tested by external cobot developers etc. financed by FSTP. By using project elements “liveâ€, these FSTP beneficiaries not only develop their cobots further towards market, but also contribute their knowledge to the COVR system and provide valuable feedback to both partners and standards developers.
Work performed
The COVR project was launched in January 2018 and has been a strong representative for the EU efforts on safety within the robotics domain. Establishing a high-performance project team, spreading the message about our presence and establishing consensus around our work has been a large effort, for which tangible results are hard to document. However, the project has since launch achieved many results that are tangible, such as:
- Attracted 76 eligible applicants to the first open call
- Started 20 Award projects, with a total of 31 European companies involved
- Established 5 state of the art safety testing facilities
- Drafted the first safety validation protocols to be tested by beneficiaries
- Created a free access online Toolkit for helping companies find relevant standards, directives and protocols
Final results
The COVR project introduces a large number of safety validation protocols for robotics. These protocols are currently strongly underrepresented in both technical literature and standardization documents, which leads to uncertainty in the industry on how to assess safety for robots working in shared workspace with humans. Introducing a broad range of proven protocols will address this issue and lower the barrier for safely introducing this type of robotics across many domains, ranging from manufacturing to agriculture to healthcare.
The online accessible Toolkit allows coboteers that are inexperienced within standardization, to find directives, standards and protocols that are relevant to their specific application, saving them a lot of time searching for the right documents. Safety/standardization experts can also use the toolkit, as it can be used for browsing and filtering the COVR Toolkit database. This service will, like the protocols, result in safer robots in operation as finding the correct regulation and best-practice to follow will become easier, which in the end is expected to lead to fewer accidents involving collaborative robots.
The fact that validating safety will become faster, more standardized and transparent is overall expected to promote the rate of implementation of collaborative robots on the European market.
Website & more info
More info: http://www.safearoundrobots.com.