Development of validation methods for safe mobile manipulation

With the future ISO 13482, the first safety standard defining specific requirements for personal care robots will be published in 2013. While the current draft of this standard gives detailed advice on risk reduction and control system design, it lacks validation methods which are essential for proving, that a sufficient level of risk reduction has been reached. In this paper, the need for additional validation methods for mobile manipulating robots is discussed and the development of validation criteria is described. To ensure practicability of the validation methods, a setup with the reference system Care-O-bot® 3 for the practical evaluation of all requirements is presented.