Approach for Modeling and Monitoring Hazards Towards Safety Digital Twins for Robotic Applications

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is an advancing field which integrates the skills of humans and robots for realizing more flexible and efficient production lines. However, one of the main challenges of HRC is ensuring human safety. This paper presents a new approach for 1. modeling the most common hazards mentioned in ISO 12100, 2. developing a multilayer architecture for monitoring these hazards in a 3D environment as a digital shadow at present, and as a basis for safety-related digital twins in the future. All the safety-related data can be collected and analyzed over time. Consequently, possible hazard situations could be detected before they occur. The proposed method considers the safety regulations and standards and makes the user able to change the safety-related functions and sensors intuitively for dynamic processes and agile environments. The approach has been successfully implemented and tested in an industrial use case.