A Human-in-the-Loop Perspective for Safety Assessment in Robotic Applications

Human-Robot Collaborative (HRC) applications pose new challenges in the assessment of their safety, due to the close interaction between robots and human operators. This entails that a human-in-the-loop perspective must be taken, at both the design and the operation level, when assessing the safety of these applications. In this paper we present an extension of a tool-supported methodology compatible with current ISO 10218-2 standard, called SAFER-HRC, which: (i) takes into account the possible behaviors of human operators-such as mistakes and misuses while working with the robot (operational level)-and (ii) exploits the expertise of safety engineers in order to incrementally update and adjust the model of the system (design level). The methodology is supported by a tool that allows designers to formally verify the modeled HRC applications in search of safety violations in an iterative manner.