Mold Setter’s Head Struck By a Cycling Single-side Gantry Robot
A 29-year old male died from injuries sustained when he was struck on the head by a cycling single side gantry robot (2001) …

Machine Operator Crushed By Robotic Platform
A 23-year-old carousel operator at a meat packing plant was killed when his foot tripped a light sensor causing a computer controlled robotic platform to come down from above, crushing his skull (1999) …

Die Cast Operator Pinned by Robot …

Such headlines (source: the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health - Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation, NIOSH-FACE) are the strongest motivation for our work towards robot safety and dependability: the most important impact we aim at is to reduce their number and gravity of similar reports.
Popular notions of robotics have long foreseen humans and robots existing side-by-side, sharing work, or even (as cyborgs) integrating into a greater whole. Until quite recently, the reality has been quite different, and industrial robots have been far too dangerous to share space with humans. Notwithstanding the enforcement of strict robot safeguarding and segregation, human fatalities have not been uncommon.
Reported studies indicate that many robot accidents do not occur under normal operating conditions but, instead during programming, program touch-up or refinement, maintenance, repair, testing, setup, or adjustment. During many of these operations the operator, programmer, or corrective maintenance worker may temporarily be within the robot's working envelope where unintended operations could result in injuries.
Data indicate that, even in traditional applications of industrial robots, safety is not a solved problem – especially because of all operational phases where the human operator is by necessity physically interacting with the mechanical arm or vehicle.
Further data indicate that workers in the industrial manufacturing environment suffer of more problems. Repetitive manual material handling exposes people to work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSD). In 1990, the average U.S. worker’s compensation bill for a lost-time back injury was $24,000 (source: National Council of Compensation Insurance). The ergonomics and productivity consequences are also documented for U.S. industries: in 1995, 43% of worker sustained injuries and illnesses were due to bodily reaction and exertion; 62% of all illness cases were due to repeated trauma disorders; and 32% of cases involving days away from work resulted from overexertion or repetitive motion [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,1997; NIOSH/Rosenstock, 1997]. The total cost of these and related problems is of the order of $13 to $20 billion annually in the U.S. alone. In many cases, robotic assistance could reduce WMSD drastically. It is recognized that future manufacturing scenarios throughout all industrial branches will have to combine highest productivity and flexibility with minimal manufacturing equipment life-cycle-cost [EUROP high level report, April 2005]. This paradigm is particularly valid for todays small- and medium-sized productions as these are particularly prone to relocation due to high labor costs. To face these challenges, paradigms of knowledge-based manufacturing have been formulated during the Lisbon Summit in the year 2000 by concentrating on high-added value products, skilled work force and superior manufacturing technology to respond to changing customer demands. This holds particularly for the situation in the New Member States where a sustainable alternative to typical low-wage manufacturing has to be offered. Up until now robot automation technologies have been specifically developed for capital-intensive large-volume manufacturing, resulting in relatively costly and complex systems, which often cannot be used in small- and medium-sized manufacturing with their typically small batch sizes.
Furthermore new branches of robot automation such as food, logistics, recycling etc. require radical new designs of robot systems with safety being a primary concern in human-robot collaboration scenarios.
Thus, future robot systems will not be a simple extrapolation of today’s technology but rather follow new design principles required by a wide range of possible applications.
Relieving humans from bad working conditions (operation of hazardous machines, handling poisonous or heavy material, dangerous or unpleasant environments) leads to many opportunities for applying safe and dependable robotics technology. Examples of bad working conditions can be found in foundries, the metal working industry, in slaughterhouses, fisheries and cold stores as well as in painter workshops, glazier workshops and garbage handling plants. The economic impact of safe and dependable robots in the manufacturing industry is huge in terms of reduction of plant layout footprint, increase of productivity of workers and machines, and overall competitiveness. Especially SMEs will benefit from new safety technologies because robot automation will becomes much simpler and less expensive.

Safe and dependable human-centered robotics is not only ethical: it also pays off

Results of this project will deeply impact applications where successful task completion requires people and robots to collaborate directly in a shared workspace. In fact, market pressures are about to topple some of the barriers separating robots and people.
Consider for example the automotive industry. While the advent of robots has mitigated harsh, unsafe conditions in the body shop (where sheet metal is welded into a structure), and the paint shop, other areas have gone untouched for over three decades. The general assembly (GA) area, where the engine and cockpit sub-systems and seats and tires are integrated with the painted shell is such: The tooling used tends to be mechanical in nature and is primarily powered by human and pneumatic effort. Sensing and decision making are the worker’s responsibility. The principal reasons for not automating General Assembly are both technical and economic. From a technological perspective, using robots for assembly in processes with high geometric dimensional variability is yet to be achieved with the reliability levels required for high volume production. Further, programming complexity grows exponentially with the number of trim options offered to the customer (e.g., leather seats, two-tone color, V6 engine, over-head console). Financially, the necessary increase in physical floor space dramatically impacts costs. In summary, the worker – with unsurpassed sensing and processing abilities – is a critical component in the assembly process. The primary concern, then, is that of the worker’s well being, given that he/she tends to tire and is susceptible to injuries resulting from cognitive and motor effort. A particularly promising application domain for the technologies developed in this project is that of Intelligent Assist Devices (IADs). IADs are a class of robots intended principally for “co-manipulation” of payloads along with a human partner. IADs serve principally to augment the strength of a human, but they may also serve to guide motion via virtual surfaces, tracking of a moving assembly line, or the like.
R&D in IADs is actively stimulated by automotive industries (General Motors and Ford Motor in the U.S., and Toyota in Japan taking the lead the development of technologies and new standards). The value of the robot-person collaboration is also being discovered in a variety of non-industrial environments: from exoskeletons as human power amplifiers and haptic interfaces in virtual reality environments, to medical assistants and telesurgery, to rehabilitation and robotic sports-injury trainers. Products of this project will provide much needed support to these applications.
Innovation. will be achieved by the project’s highly innovative, integrated approach to the co-design of robots for safe physical interaction with humans, which revolutionizes the classical design paradigm of industrial robots – rigid design for accuracy, active control for safety – into a new one: design robots that are intrinsically safe, and control them to deliver performance. Innovation-related activities are not limited to research, however. Indeed, to grow strong innovation seeds have to be planted in a suitable environment. Work in WP1 is planned to carry out the necessary domain analysis to accurately map the specifications and requirements that will make our innovations viable and successful.
Exploitation. Results of the project are expected to have an important potential for exploitation. Our primary exploitation policy is straightforward an unequivocal: the adoption of part of our results in new products or product components by the industrial partner, KUKA Roboter GmbH. The DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics and the KUKA Roboter GmbH have currently a technology transfer cooperation for the commercialization of the DLR light-weight robot technology. The light-weight robot, with its mechatronic design and force-torque sensing and control along the entire robot structure will be the first robot dedicatedly designed and programmed for human-robot interaction in industrial environments, as a robot assistant. It is expected that it will have a very high impact on enlarging the industrial and service robot applicability. It could easily envisaged that even todays standard robots could be equipped with advanced control hardware and software, so that the impact of the project is not only limited to the before-mentioned light-weight robot technology. The interest from potential customers from industry and academia who cleary see the benefits from applying and using such robots, is very high already. While turning research prototypes into products, one of the major topics to be addressed is to ensure to the highest level possible the safety of the humans which are using these robots. A substantial part of the proposed project is dedicated to this task. Our short-term exploitation policy mostly concerns control SW products that the project will deliver primarily in WP 3. Longer term exploitation of results involving more “invasive” innovation, concerning the mechanical structure of the robots, their control HW and architecture, will proceed through IPR protection according to the Consortium Agreement, and options offered to the industrial partner.
European Dimension. The PHRIENDS consortium brings together partners of absolute standing in their complementary fields: we are confident to claim that no better competences could have been found in other continents. It is a fortunate fact, and an important opportunity for the EC, that Europe gathers the critical industrial and intellectual mass to tackle such an ambitious enterprise as to develop the next generation of safe robots physically interacting with people. Europe is worldwide leader in technologies and products for safe robotics; it is Europe’s best interest to remain such, and expand the market where these products can be applied. Integration with existing efforts in the EC will be carefully taken into account in our dissemination and education policies. Cross-fertilization with other efforts in the area will be greatly facilitated by participation of partners to such projects as SMEROBOT, COGNIRON, RUNES. It is also noteworthy that the role and visibility of the key personnel in PHRIENDS and their leadership in the Networks of Excellence EURON and HYCON (embedded hybrid control), in the European Robotic Platform EUROP, as well as in international scientific organizations (IEEE, IFAC, IARP) and standardization committees (e.g. for revising ISO 10218) will be valuable in spreading our results to the wider scientific community.