CWA intermediate draft: "Safety in close human-robot interaction: procedures for validation tests"

The well-established concept of robots refers to bulky machines confined to the industrial environment, carrying out repetitive tasks. In traditional industrial robotics, the operations of robot and operator are complementary and belong to separated workspaces. In the last years, we are witnessing the increasing implementation of robots and robotic devices in several other domains, such as minimally invasive surgery, healthcare, rehabilitation, agriculture and logistics. The CWA 'CEN/WS COVR Safety in close human-robot interaction: procedures for validation tests' is aimed at providing a common framework for proposing a skill-based approach for testing the specific implementations of safety measures applied to mitigate the risks related to Human-robot collaboration. The cross-domain feature is a fundamental cornerstone of the proposed approach. The CEN Workshop is proposed by the COVR consortium which is developing a number of testing protocols for validating safety of collaborative robot operations. The research project is funded by the European Union under the H2020 R&I programme.