New robot safety standard introduces humans into loop

While it was once thought that fix­tur­ing should be inte­grat­ed as a go-between for man and machine dur­ing auto­mat­ed robot process­es, that line of thought has been erad­i­cat­ed with the new nation­al robot safe­ty stan­dard by the Amer­i­can Nation­al Stan­dards Institute.

This is the first update for the stan­dard ANSI/RIA R15.06 – 2012 since 1999, and this change now har­mo­nizes it with Inter­na­tion­al ISO 10218:2011 stan­dard for robot man­u­fac­tur­ers and integrators.

The adop­tion of this stan­dard inter­na­tion­al­ly allows sys­tems designed and built in one coun­try to be moved freely between coun­tries with­out falling out of com­pli­ance with safe­ty regulations.

This new stan­dard fea­tures ​“col­lab­o­ra­tive oper­a­tion,” a mea­sure that intro­duces a work­er into active inter­ac­tion dur­ing auto­mat­ic robot oper­a­tion. Now, sys­tems can be designed with the oper­a­tor direct­ly load­ing and unload­ing the robot, which elim­i­nates cost­ly fix­tures that were once the mid­dle­man between the oper­a­tor and the robot.

Anoth­er fea­ture is the ​“safe­ty-rat­ed soft axis and space lim­it­ing” tech­nol­o­gy, which allows safe­ty-rat­ed soft­ware to con­trol the robot motion so the restrict­ed space is more flexible.

Case stud­ies demon­strate that fea­ture saves floor space and cost for sys­tem designs.

For more infor­ma­tion about automa­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties in your facil­i­ty and what Robots​.com can do for you, con­tact our sales depart­ment today online or at 877−762−6881.