2017 3rd International Conference on Control, Automation and Robotics

Safe Human-Robot-Collaboration-Introduction and Experiment Using ISO/TS

15066

Martin J. Rosenstrauch J6rg Kri.iger

Institute for Machine Tools and Factory Management Institute for Machine Tools and Factory Management
Technische Universitat Berlin Technische Universitat Berlin
Berlin, Germany Berlin, Germany
email: rosenstrauch@tu-berlin.de email: joerg.krueger@tu-berlin.de

Abstract-The use of industrial robots for human-robot­
collaborative applications continually gains in significance. The
advantages of both human and robots can be combined to
minimize the disadvantages. Human skills like cognition,
adaptation or tactile abilities can be added with robot
strengths like speed, force or precision. Besides its advantages
this development also cause new challenges regarding safety
measures, particularly to ensure humans integrity working
closed to or even with heavy robots. Therefore in February
2016 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
published a new specification ISO/TS 15066 (Robots and
robotic devices - Collaborative robots), a supplement to EN ISO
10218 (Robots and robotic devices - Safety requirements for
industrial robots). To get a comprehensive overview of the new
specification this paper first gives an introduction into safety
standards and guidelines for risk assessment in general and
industrial robots specifically, followed by a more detailed
insight into ISO/TS 15066. An experiment with an exemplary
standard collaboration scenario demonstrates its usage. A
subsequent discussion about the illustrated residual hazard
potential in case of an incident despite compliance with ISO/TS
15066 and a prospect on future approaches to achieve more
safety within human-robot-collaboration will complete this
paper.
Keywords-ISOITS 15066; safety; risk assessment; human­
robot-collaboration; shared workspace
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays manufacturing moves from conventional static
production lines with large lot sizes to more flexible and
easily adaptable factory units to manufacture or assemble
small batches or even individual constructions. In the course
of this process collaboration of humans and robots become
more and more important [1], [2]. The exclusive use of
industrial robots separated from workers by physical safe
guards was extended by operation modes, where workers act
very proximate to or even collaborative with robots (Fig. 1).
As a consequence existing standards and requirements
regarding safety are no longer sufficient.
more specific standard for industrial robots is EN ISO 10218
[4]. These standards are basic guidelines for identifying
possible hazards, evaluate them and reduce the risk of
accidents. Basically three main steps have to be repeated
until the residual risk of eligible hazards is minimized or
brought to an acceptable level.
,-----,
1---------
1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
I 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1
L _________I
Figure I. From conventional safe guards to collaborative operation modes
The first step within a risk assessment is a risk analysis
which means the identification of all risks or hazards that
may occur during all kind of operation modes combined with
all possible activities (setting, process changeover, etc.).
Unintended behaviour of the operator or unpredictable
behaviour of the robot system must be taken into
consideration. Most typical hazards are mechanical ones like
bruising, cutting, clamping or impacts. Furthennore there can
be electrical or thermal hazards, or additional risks due to
noise, vibration, radiation, chemicals and many others.
The risk analysis is followed by a risk evaluation of
tagged hazards. Here probabilities and extents of damages or
injuries are assessed. The results can be divided into different
"Performance Level" (PL) or "Safety Integrity Level" (SIL).
PL is defined in EN ISO 13849-1 [5]. SIL is introduced in
EN 61508 [6] and EN 62061 [7]. The different level in PL
and SIL both are based on the probability of dangerous
failure per hour and can be transformed into each other
through some kind of lookup table.
risk assessment
lEN ISO 1Z100:2010) risk analysis
risk evaluation

A. Industrial Robot Safety and Risk Assessment

risk reduction
Industrial robots are large and powerful machines with
huge operating ranges and often with unpredictable and residual risk
unanticipated movements. For this reason a risk assessment
is required to put robots into operation. A general standard
for safety of machinery is given with EN ISO 12100 [3]. A Figure 2. ISOITS 12100:2010 basic procedure of risk assessment

978-1-5090-6088-7117/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 740

 After having identified and evaluated possible risks
particular hazards are reduced by diverse protective
measures or safeguards like tripping functions, guards or
others. As shown in Fig. 2 the procedure described is finally
repeated iteratively with a risk comparison after each
iteration until the residual risk is reduced to minimum.
B. Safety in Human-Robot-Collaboration
Earlier work like [8]-[10] already recognized the
necessity of research in the area of safety. Only that allows a
transfer of scientific progress in the field of human-robot­
collaboration to an industrial level. Besides technological
approaches of safety improvement by using for example
optical or capacitive sensors [11], [12] another research
subject was the investigation of injury levels caused by a
collision between human and robot [13]-[15].
The established standard ISO 10218 is not sufficient to
archive both, maximum safety and a flexible human-robot­
collaboration usage. Knowing that for years [16] the
International Organisation of Standardization specified the
requirements for collaborative industrial robots and
published the technical specification ISO/TS 15066:2016
[17].
II. TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION ISO/TS 15066
The technical specification ISO/TS 15066 is not a
standard, it rather updates the state of the art in existing robot
safety standards. Now it is accepted as best practise in
addition to DIN EN 10218 regarding human-robot­
collaboration. While DIN EN 10218 states that any contact
"should not create an injury", ISO/TS 15066 names limits for
force and speed to comply that. The specification does not
replace risk assessment given in 10218 but makes reasonable
for the first time. Because of that it is planned to add its
content to ISO EN 10218 in the next review in 2017. ISO/TS
15066 first introduces into general hazard identification and
risk assessment regarding to human-robot-collaborative
systems. After that requirements for collaborative robot
system applications are presented. A distinction is made here
between four different operating modes:
The four operation modes in more detail are:
• Safety-rated monitored stop only allows a robot
motion if the operator is outside of the collaborative
workspace. As soon as he enters to interact, the
robot motion stops until he exits (Fig. 3, a).
• Speed and separation monitoring goes one step
further by allowing the operator to enter the
collaborative workspace. Here the robot motion
speed de- or increases dynamically depending on
the distance between
operator and robot. If the distance gets below a
minimum protection separation distance the robot
stops (Fig. 3, b).
• Hand guiding goes another step further. In this first
case of accepting a contact between human and
robot the operator is able to guide the robot by
moving it by hand within the collaborative
workspace, e.g. by a hand-guiding device or by the
use of force torque sensor at the tool center point
741
transmitting the manual input into robot motion
(Fig. 3, c).
• Power and force limiting finally allows a
completely shared collaborative workspace and the
possibility of unintentional and unpredictable
collisions between human and robot. In order to
provide safety power and force are limited to ensure
compliance with given biomechanical force or
pressure thresholds (Fig. 3, d). These biomechanical
limits (maximum pressure and forces) for quasi­
static and transient contact depend on different
body parts, shown as red dots in Fig. 4. Equations
for calculating transient contact speed limit values
are introduced. Due to this, it is possible to derive
and implement concrete settings (maximum speed,
force) to the robot system to ensure safety after risk
assessment.
/
Figure 3. 1S0rrS 15066:2016 collaborative operation modes
Figure 4. 1S0rrS 15066:2016 body model and different body parts
The reason for dividing human-robot-collaboration into
different operation modes is to be found in different
application areas. Cases of manufacturing, where power or
force usually need to be fixed, can be handled by safety­
monitored steps while common use-cases like assembly or
packaging are best covered by the introduced modes power
and force limiting or hand guiding.
III. EXPERIMENT
In this part an experiment is made to demonstrate the
usage of ISO/TS 15066 and also to demonstrate that a
human-robot system might be still hazardous if the risk
assessment for a given application is inexpertly done. The
scenario contains a pick-and-place task, as shown on top in
Fig. 5. Within an abstract assembly process a work piece
symbolized by a cube shall be picked and moved (drawn
continuous line) to another position.
 Fmax= 140N (1)

Pmax 200� (2)

cm2
These limits (given in [17]) are double in case of a
transient contact. The maximum relative speed between
human and robot can be calculated:
Fmax
V,'el-max (3)
�

=
Fmax
1nnrnl1 k (4)
mH+ml1.

m
0.6730 (5)
s

where mH shall be assumed with 0. 6kg for a human hand and

Figure 5. exemplary pick-and-place task (top) and unintended incident mR is the sum of half of the total mass of the moving parts of
caused by unpredicted and unintended human operation (bottom)
the robot and the effective payload, all together estimated to
15kg. k is called effective spring constant and for the back of
As it is planned to have a human-robot-collaboration
within that assembly process in general all guards are a hand given with 75 n�n. The maximum transfer energy E
reduced to a level where it is possible for a worker to place allowed during a transient contact is limited to 0,49J. The
something into or grasp something out of the robot operating transferred energy is related to the robot speed:
area. Due to that an unintended contact between human and 1
robot may occur (Fig. 5 bottom). Within a risk assessment E 2f..lVre1 (6)
the operation mode power and force limiting was selected.
=> Vrel 2f..lE (7)
A. Experimental Setup
The used kinematic is a standard 6 DOF robot ann
0.5654 m (8)
(consisting of Schunk Amtec PowerCube modules) with a s
gripper as end effector. As specific body area the back of a
workers hand is chosen. A potential hazard might be a The maximum speed Vmax is either is limited to its direct
transient contact between gripper and hand followed by calculation (9) or results out of the maximal allowed transfer
clamping and dragging along the hand while continuing the energy (6):
planned pick-and-place task. Forces applied on the hand by Vmax max( Vrel, Vrel-max ) (9)
the robot were measured with a force torque sensor system,
to ensure that they are within allowed limits. The complete
=> Vmax V"el 0.5654 m (10)
s
=

experimental setup can be seen in Fig. 6.

6 OOF robot -::==:!...;
Figure 6. Experimental setup
As described above in this case risk reduction is achieved
by limiting the maximum force and torque of the robot
system which in turn is effected by limiting power and speed.
The required values are either given in ISO/TS 15066 [17] or
determined by equations also given in [17] accordingly. The
maximum permissible pressure and force for this particular
body area and the case of a quasi-static contact has to be
limited:
Summarised: under the tenns of the scenario outlined
above and after a done risk assessment a robot could possibly
clamp the back of a humans hand with a force of 140N on a
contact area of less than lcm2, e.g. with the front of one
single gripper jaw. That could happen in a trivial way while
the worker tries to grasp a work piece carelessly and his hand
gets between work piece and gripper. In this moment the
relative speed between human hand and robot gripper can be
quite less than the allowed Vmax � 0.59. Even though
ISO/TS 15066 was considered it is obvious that serious
injury might be the consequence. Nevertheless ISO/TS
15066 states: "the limits will prevent the occurrence of skin
or soft tissue penetrations".
To demonstrate the assumption of a still hazardous
situation, although ISO/TS 15066 was applied, the
introduced pick-and-place task with a simulated quasi-static
contact is done with a piece of pork belly, which is for
example often used in medical teaching to simulate human
back skin [18].

742
B. Experimental Results
The experiment confirmed the assumption made before.
In particular the safety limit for Fmax calculated in accordance
with ISO/TS 15066 led to considerable strains to the pork
belly. Fig. 7 presents the smoothed forces in X-, y- and z­
direction measured by a force torque sensor. Besides a
clearly quantifiable impact in z-direction (Fig. 7 top left) a
horizontal movement (Fig. 7 top right) causes additional
forces along the direction of movement, which in turn would
cause violations between layers of tissue.
r-------,
80
�60
�
[�:
fl40
.E 20 F
z Firstly it seems expedient to pursue the identification and
--
0 ...;.
0 2 3 5
time [51
Figure 7. Measured forces in X-, y- and z-direction
The pork belly skin was put under heavy strain. Minor
cuts were added. To get a rough idea of the measured impact
fig. 8 shows the depth of penetration (approx. 25mm) at a
contact of only one gripper jaw with Fz = 85N, which is
about 60% of the allowed force for a clamping contact.
Completely not taken into account so far is the risk of bone
injury which is in this context hard to simulate, especially
metacarpals.
Figure 8. quasi-static contact - depth of penetration with a force F,;::O 85N
IV. DISCUSSION
The experiment done illustrates the decreased but still
existing gap between a feasible guideline for safety in human
robot collaboration and the resulting real safety. Even though
ISO/TS 15066 was_applied in a reasonable way the human
skin simulating pork belly was seriously violated. As it is
written within the specification itself, limits for force and
pressure are taken out of a single study. The given values are
individual pain thresholds which might cause painful
accidents with substantial injuries. The calculation procedure
for power and force limiting is based on modem lightweight
designed robots; widely used heavy industrial robots are not
addressed. Furthermore "objects with sharp, pointed,
shearing or cutting edges, such as needles, shears, or knives,
and parts which could cause injury shall not be present in
the contact area" [17]. Those facts limit the usability in
addition. Unknown factors such as Vhuman are still difficult to
handle and cannot be fully covered. In this case the challenge
is to assess that unknown which is an important factor for the
resulting impulse between human and robot in cause of a
collision, because even if the robot speed is very limited,
human could move or accelerate that fast [19], [20], that the
resulting energy could be higher than permitted. Not yet
widely researched is the general acceptance of a human­
robot-shared workspace. Studies about fundamental
questions like how heavy or fast a robot might be to be
accepted in a shared workspace by a human worker or
aspects like the predictability of the robot movement with
varying paths due to collision avoiding path planning or
varying tasks are still missing.
A. Future Work
division of different application scenarios and to specify
6 concrete and more individual risk assessment guidelines.
Therefore limits for force and speed are expected to evolve
by investigating body zone dependent pain thresholds in
future studies. On this basis it is to be expected that new
permitted limits for force and speed limits will be lower as at
present. As a consequence flexible human robot
collaboration could become be restricted. As well it seems
appropriate to identify existing technologies, approaches and
methods and further use them to confirm the adherence of
latest safety standards. Thus, for example, speed limits of
robot movement and possible resulting impulse energies
could be monitored by optical systems or acceleration
sensors. Such approaches could also support the
improvement of workers acceptance in a safe human-robot­
collaboration. In addition it is conceivable to combine
different safety systems in a redundant way. Current research
in cloud based service technologies with abstract infinite
computing power only limited by transfer rates and latencies
allow new approaches in merging various safety systems.
V. CONCLUSION
The most important statement of ISO/TS 15066 is an
implicit one: a safe robot does not exist, at best safe
applications. But safety here means that there is still a risk of
serious injury. To assume that an industrial robot is safe as
long as the specification is taken into account to ISO 10218
does not comply to an expertly application. The present
paper briefly introduced into industrial robot safety, risk
assessment and especially the current state of human-robot-
743
collaboration safety. The growing trend towards shared
workplaces caused the development of a new specification
refining safety requirements - called ISO/TS 15066. For a
better understanding of the specifications significance and to
allow a correct apply its content was explained in more detail
supplemented by an experimental example use case. A fmal
discussion emphasized possibilities and limits of the latest
international guideline on safety regarding human-robot­
collaboration and gave a prospect on further steps towards
achieving a maximum in human robot safety within
changing requirements.
REFERENCES
[I] 1. Krueger, T. Lien, and A. VerI, "Cooperation of human and
machines in assembly lines," {CiRP} Annals - Manufacturing
Technology, vol. 58,no. 2,pp. 628 - 646,2009.
[2] 1. Fryman and B. Matthias, "Safety of industrial robots: From
conventional to collaborative applications," in Robotics; Proceedings
of ROBOTiK 2012; 7th German Conference on, May 2012,pp. 1-5.
[3] ISO 12100:2011-03, "Safety of machinery - general principles for
design - risk assessment and risk reduction (ISO 12100:20I0),"
International Organization for Standardization,Standard DIN EN ISO
12100,Mar. 2012.
[4] ISO 10218-1:2012-01, "Robots and robotic devices - safety
requirements for industrial robots - part I: Robots (ISO 10218-
1:2011)," International Organization for Standardization, Standard
DIN EN ISO 10218-1,Jan. 2012.
[5] ISO 13849-1:2015, "Safety of machinery - safety-related parts of
control systems - part I: General principles for design (ISO
138491:2015)," International Organization for Standardization,
Standard DIN EN ISO 13849-1,Jun. 2015.
[6] IEC 61508-1:2010, "Functional safety of
electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems
part I: General requirements (TEC 61508-1:2010)," DIN German
Institute for Standardization,Standard DIN EN 61508-1,Feb. 2016.
[7] IEC 62061:2005 + AI:2012 + A2:2015), "Safety of machinery -
functional safety of safety-related electrical, electronic and
programmable electronic control systems (IEC 62061:2005 + al:2012
+ a2:2015)," DIN German Institute for Standardization,Standard DIN
EN 62061,May 2016.
[8] B. Matthias, S. Kock, H. Jerregard, M. Kilman, and 1. Lundberg,
"Safety of collaborative industrial robots: Certification possibilities
for a collaborative assembly robot concept," in Assembly and
744
Manufacturing (ISAM), 2011 iEEE international Symposium on, May
2011,pp. 1-6.
[9] M. Giuliani,C. Lenz, T. Muller, M. Rickert, and A. Knoll, "Design"
principles for safety in human-robot interaction," international
Journal of Social Robotics, vol. 2,no. 3,pp. 253-274,2010.
[10] J. T. C. Tan,F. Duan,Y. Zhang,R. Kato,and T. Arai,"Safety design
and development of human-robot collaboration in cellular
manufacturing," in 2009 IEEE International Conference on
Automation Science and Engineering, Aug 2009,pp. 537-542.
[II] c. Morato, K. N. Kaipa, B. Zhao, and S. K. Gupta, 'Toward safe
human robot collaboration by using multiple kinects based real-time
human tracking," Journal of Computing and information Science in
Engineering, vol. 14,no. I,p. 011006,2014.
[12] B. Sekoranja, D. Ba' si' c, M. ' Svaco, F.' Suligoj, and B. Jerbi' c,
"Human-' robot interaction based on use of capacitive sensors,"
Procedia Engineering, vol. 69,pp. 464-468, 2014.
[13] S. Haddadin,A. Albu-Schaffer,and G. Hirzinger,"Requirements for"
safe robots: Measurements, analysis and new insights," The
international Journal of Robotics Research, vol. 28, no. 11-12, pp.
1507-1527,2009.
[14] S. Haddadin, S. Haddadin, A. Khoury, T. Rokahr, S. Parusel, R.
Burgkart, A. Bicchi, and A. Albu-Schffer, "A truly safely moving
robot has to know what injury it may cause," in 2012 IEEE/RSJ
international Conference on intelligent Robots and Systems, Oct 2012,
pp. 5406- 5413.
[15] C. A. Cordero,G. Carbone,M. Ceccarelli,J. Echvarri,and 1. L. Muoz,
"Experimental tests in human-robot collision evaluation and
characterization of a new safety index for robot operation,"
Mechanism and Machine Theory, vol. 80,pp. 184 - 199,2014.
[16] 1. Fryman, "Updating the industrial robot safety standard," in
iSRIRobotik 2014; 4ist international Symposium on RobotiCS;
Proceedings of, June 2014,pp. 1-4.
[17] ISO/TS 15066:2016, "Robots and robotic devices - collaborative
robots," International Organization for Standardization, Standard
ISO/TS 15066:2016,Feb. 2016.
[18] X. Wang, Y. Albahrani, M. Pan, and J. Levitt, "Skin simulators for
dermatological procedures," Dermatology online journal, vol. 21,no.
11,2015.
[19] S. Kajikawa,M. Saito, K. Ohba, and H. Inooka, "Analysis of human
arm movement for catching a moving object," in Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics, 1999. iEEE SMC '99 Conference Proceedings. 1999
iEEE international Conference on, vol. 2,1999,pp. 698-703 vol.2.
[20] N. Fligge, J. Mcintyre, and P. van der Smagt, "Minimum jerk for
human catching movements in 3d," in 2012 4th iEEE RAS EMBS
international Conference on Biomedical Robotics and
Biomechatronics (BioRob), June 2012,pp. 581-586.