1. Modeling human-robots teams to optimize their safety
- Author
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Steijn, W.M.P., Oosterhout, J. van, Vorm, J.K.J. van der, Jansen, A., and Schragen, J.M.C.
- Subjects
Incidents ,Work and Employment ,Production ,Safety ,Workplace ,Robots ,Healthy Living ,Workers - Abstract
Since the start of the first industrial revolution in the late 18th century, machines have been used to support people in difficult tasks. To keep people safe when using these machines, people and machines are usually kept separate in accordance with current health and safety requirements (European Directive 2006/42/EG machinery, Appendix 1). Recent developments have introduced so called cobots or cooperative robots (in the remainder of this report we will refer to these machines as robots), which place the machines on the work floor next to employees. These robots have the potential to fully utilize both the strong points of machine (e.g., accuracy and speed) and of human workers (e.g., flexibility and creativity) in cooperative tasks. The great advantage of this new form of interaction is that the scalability of the production increases, however, it also poses new challenges to secure the safety of workers as separation is no longer a viable option. The necessity to address this challenge Is highlighted by recent incidents that occurred with robots
- Published
- 2019