Guided safety design, configuration and execution of small part assembly process with collaborative robots
Description
Challenge
Solve the safety requirements for implementing a Human-Robot-Collaboration (HRC). Safety is regarded as one of the main bottlenecks for implementing such systems.
Solution:
Fraunhofer IPA and Denso extended the existing HORSE framework with “SafetyDesigner”, a planning module for the design and configuration of safety behaviors.
It aids the planning engineers by analyzing the planned processes and deriving – from the list of available resource – suggestion for supported safety behaviors to make the production processes safe. Using the tool, the planning and implementation of safety technologies can go hand in hand with the planning and implementation of the actual production processes.
To facilitate the parameterization of the safety technologies, Fraunhofer IPA developed another tool, which uses Augmented Reality (AR) technologies for in-situ visualization and manipulation of safety parameters (e.g. trajectories, workspaces), the “SafetyConfigurator”.
The developed tool makes it particularly easy to inspect new protective fields of the laser scanner in-situ. This mainly benefits the safety engineer during the setup phase and enables a quick adaption of the setup, e.g. if stations in a production line need to be rearranged.
Information flow in the solution
Implementation time: 9 months
Implementation cost: € 170,000 (+ Hardware cost).
Output
Safetydesigner, an add-on to the Horse Framework, which aids safety engineers in the selection of appropriate safety technology and configurations to make Human-robot-collaborative (HRC) production applications safe. The tool reduced the outline and planning of the safety configuration for an assembly process spanning 2 manual stations and 2 robot stations to under 1h.
SafetyConfigurator, a HoloLens application, which is able to visualize the configuration of a laser scanner (warning / stop fields) and allows the user to modify the fields to the real environment.
Impact
Fraunhofer IPA and Denso are working on extending the functionalities of the tools and validating them in more HRC applications, i.e. developing a taxonomy for the standardized description of safety technology, as well as making the generated PLC Code agnostic of the actual PLC hardware. Also, work is being performed on embedding those tools in a digital production planning tool chain to reduce engineering and integration time and effort by at least 50%.
This experiment has been supported by Horse project. (See this experiment inproject’s site)
Project:
Enterprises:
Denso Manufacturing Czech (End user); Applic s.r.o. (System Integrator); Denso European Production Innovation and Applic s.r.o. ( Tech Providers); Fraunhofer IPA (RTO) ‘
Sector
Metal
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