How safe is safe? Safeguarding your most valuable assets.

Omron’s value as a safety partner goes beyond its comprehensive range of products. The company offers unmatched expertise, products and services that enable you to find the best solution to safeguard your most valuable assets- your people- without compromising productivity. Khotso Majoe , Sensing and Safety Product Manager at Omron ZA-OEE explains.

Workplace safety is a concern for most manufacturers?across?industries?and regions. An astounding 72% of interviewed manufacturers worldwide said that they experience collisions and other shop floor accidents as the single, most challenging business issue in a recently published report.?Unlike older technology, Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) can?autonomously navigate around people and other obstacles on their path while calculating the?best route to their target item or destination. This means these robots are,?in many cases,?the?best?solution?to?optimise?workplace safety and productivity at the same time. A win-win situation for everybody involved, right?

AMRs are expected to provide services in various domains of life. The main challenge for the robot is the execution of complex tasks within an unstructured dynamic environment while collaborating with human users naturally and intuitively. To achieve the necessary highly flexible behaviour, AMRs must have a high degree of autonomy without compromising on safety. ?Although much effort has been spent on the investigation and realisation of robot autonomy for decades, it is mostly neglected that AMRs are also causing new types of safety concerns. While a safe stationary robotic manipulator can be obtained by avoiding any collisions with users or the environment (sometimes with the help of a separating safety cage or lighting curtains), this is no longer the case for AMRs. Here, touching human persons might be necessary on the one side, while the robot's pure decisions, for example, delivering a requested part, could also cause big safety concerns on the other side.

AMRs are identified as safety-critical systems. In this context, safety is interpreted as a state of the environment and any method to check safety during operation requires suitable measures. Active measures are introduced, whereby safety is mainly influenced by the safety of the state of operation and the safety of the robot's behaviour. AMRs are becoming bigger, heavier, more complex and more autonomous, and together these factors are creating entirely new safety challenges faced by machine manufacturers, integrators and users alike.

Safety critical systems are those systems whose failure could result in loss of life, significant property damage or damage to the environment that the AMR operates. Before a system can be called “safe”, it has to be ensured that risks are kept at acceptable levels by using the IEC61508, which is the Electronics Functional Safety Package. In this package, the risk is the possibility of injury, loss or environmental incident created by a hazard, while the significance or level of the risk is generally determined by the probability of an unwanted incident and the severity of the consequences.

The moral of the story is that Autonomous Mobile Robots have considerable mass and kinetic energy during operation, they share the same environment with human users and autonomous mobile robots are in addition even enabled to make their own decisions. It is safe to say that AMRs, especially those with a higher degree of autonomy as previously mentioned have to be assessed and declared safe to work in the same space and alongside their human colleagues.

To face these challenges, ORMON offers Safety Service consultants in over 200 countries who can assist with these AMR applications, from the conception and design phase right through to the integration with an existing system. OMRON combines their 30 years of experience as manufacturers of mobile solutions and their extensive knowledge in the safety field (C Type Standard ISO 3691-4:2023 Industrial trucks – Safety Requirements and verification – Part 4: Driverless industrial trucks and their systems) to complete a thorough risk assessment, do the testing and validation, all the way to the end-user needs AMRs implemented in an industrial environment will naturally involve certain risks caused by the interaction of the new technology with workers and existing assets. By helping you design your specific application according to relevant standards, Omron safety consultants will enable your application to be safe and compliant during its complete lifecycle.

Did you know that the new ISO 3691-4:2023, which was published in June of this year, the standard includes specific requirements in terms of clearance between mobile robots and other structures? With OMRON’s support, you can define your application in detail and?avoid changing the complete layout?once the solution is installed.

“Omron’s value as a safety partner goes beyond its comprehensive range of products. The company offers unmatched expertise, products and services that enable you to find the best solution to safeguard your most valuable assets- your people- without compromising productivity.”