Reliable Planning of Human-Robot-Collaboration featuring Speed and Separation Monitoring

While Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) with high-payload robots is attracting the attention of industrial manufacturers, the engineering efforts and associated costs currently needed to comply with the safety requirements from standards are prohibitively high and represent a barrier to more widespread use. This paper presents a novel planning approach to reduce the aforementioned design and planning efforts. Our focus is on industrial applications featuring HRC that use Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) according to ISO/TS 15066 to safeguard the robot. This paper presents our novel approach that uses a cloud-based platform and provides planning services as an extension to commercially available planning tools to calculate the minimum protective safety distance between robot and humans. The benefits of our approach are a faster design process and less uncertainty about the required floor space and the achievable cycle time.