An ISO Compliant Safety System for Human Workers in Human-Robot Interaction Work Environment

Abstract

Industrial work environments have been focusing on employing robots within their work area for their efficiency in tedious jobs and their reliability and low chances of malfunction. However, this does not entirely eliminate the role of the human workers since some jobs need human reasoning or do not worth employing an expensive robot to do. This made the interaction between a human and a robot a persistent safety issue since there have been so many registered accidents where the robot was the main contributor to them. The international standardization organization (ISO) has set some safety procedures to be followed in areas with human-robot interaction (HRI), which should be adopted by every work environment where this interaction exists. This research explains how to adopt this standard in building a software-hardware integrated system that assures the safety and the well-being of the human workers in an HRI environment, without affecting the workflow or the processing speed of the production in the factory. The system is composed of two main parts: main software, and backup software, where an Artificial Intelligence module is embedded to make critical decisions according to the set of sensors' readings. This integration ensures the safety of the human workers' insight within ISO risk assessment standards.