Human-Robot Collaboration in Mechatronic Systems: Towards Ergonomic and Safe Mechanical Design

Collaboration between human and robot is rapidly increasing. The safety trend is moving from ‘keep humans out’ to ‘design for safe and intentional interaction.’ In mechatronic systems, how you design your hardware, where components are connected, where the end-effector is, how flexible or how tight everything is, how far apart components are, and where everything goes, is often what determines whether a human-robot collaboration can occur. The paper proposes a design-oriented framework for HRC mechatronic systems. It combines risk thinking and safety-by-design concepts of safety function planning. In this framework, rather than relying on real-world information or experiments, known safety-by-design, robot safety, and body design thinking can be combined into a process. The process can be applied to the requirements phase of design. The proposed design-oriented framework produces verifiable outputs, which can be a combined list of hazards and ergonomics, a relationship between hazards and design changes, and a plan to verify both simulation and documentation-based verification.