Safety & Risk
Safety is an engineering discipline before it is a compliance exercise. This chapter covers how to find hazards, estimate and reduce risk, design safety functions that hold when a learned policy misbehaves, and learn from incidents.
§Articles in this chapter
1 articleRobot risk assessment: the ISO 12100 method, step by step
How to run a robot risk assessment using ISO 12100: set limits, identify hazards, estimate and evaluate risk, then reduce it — and what AI changes.
§Terms from this chapter
Full glossary →Collaborative application
A robot application in which people and the robot share a workspace during operation. Standards treat collaboration as a property of the whole application — robot, tool, workpiece and task — not of the robot arm alone.
Functional safety
The part of a machine’s safety that depends on a control system performing correctly — for example, stopping the robot when a light curtain is broken. Its required reliability is expressed as a performance level or safety integrity level.
Performance level
A rating from PL a to PL e, defined in ISO 13849-1, of how reliably a safety-related part of a control system performs its safety function. PL e is the most demanding.
Power and force limiting
A collaborative safeguarding method in which contact between robot and person is allowed, but force and pressure are kept below limits set for each region of the body.
Risk assessment
The structured process of setting a machine’s limits, identifying its hazards, and estimating and evaluating the risk of each one, so that risk can be reduced to an acceptable level. ISO 12100 defines the method.
Speed and separation monitoring
A collaborative safeguarding method in which sensors track the distance between a person and the robot, and the robot slows and then stops before that distance falls below a calculated protective separation distance.