Functional Safety Takes Center Stage as Robotics Technologies Evolve

How Robot Manufacturers Can Work with UL to Drive Down the Costs and Complexity of Safety Evaluation

The fact is that we are on the leading edge of a new era in robotics.

Significant technological advances—the microprocessor, artificial intelligence, and dramatic improvements in automation and control systems (viz. software)—have led us to where early futurists and visionary engineers only imagined. Their dreams are now our reality: but how do we evaluate them when the standards formerly used did not anticipate these developments with any degree of precision or detail?

“We have reached a cusp,” says Daniel Posner, senior project engineer, industrial controls and robotics, at Underwriters Laboratories. “All the technologies are starting to jump—or leapfrog—older technologies; and as these technologies get more complex, they need a different type of standard to evaluate them. So now we're using these generally accepted functional safety standards, which are risk-based or risk management-based, and do not hold anyone to a specific type of technology.”

This makes it much easier to evaluate emerging robotic technology, and it is a central reason that functional safety has become a key topic in this important market.

Standards Development

The original robotic standard in North America was established in 1992 with ANSI/RIA R15.06-1999. This standard was significantly updated in 1999, establishing major changes in the safety requirements for industrial robots and robotic systems. The Robotics Industry Association (RIA) proposed to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that RIA 15.06-1999 be adopted internationally; and while the ISO thought that the standard was good, they wanted to improve its organization and also accommodate new developments such as software-based safety and soft axis restriction ... Read more

Integrating Functional Safety Across the Supply Chain

How UL's Functional Safety Component Recognition Facilitates The Process—And Makes Component Selection Easier for Designers

Looking at functional safety from the proverbial 30,000-foot view, making a supply chain compliant with functional safety requirements requires that each component in the chain meets the criteria for functional safety demanded by its application. While the concept is simple enough to easily grasp, implementation is challenging.

From a risk management perspective, many manufacturers are looking to defer risk downstream in the supply chain. When you build an automation system, you have relatively little control other than the choice of vendor for the different components purchased for the system. How will these choices affect the functional safety status of the system being built?

By certifying the functional safety performance of components used in specific applications, UL's functional safety component recognition program makes choosing components easier, more confident, and consistent across the supply chain.

“The whole idea is that the end user doesn't have to bear all the costs associated with risk management through the supply chain, certification of the components, and so on,” says Anura Fernando, research engineer at Underwriters Laboratories. “Having the products they choose pre-certified, with very specifically constrained conditions of use, allows them to quickly integrate them while minimizing time and cost investment.”

UL Functional Safety Component Recognition

UL's functional safety component recognition service covers the evaluation of components or materials intended for use in an end product functional safety certification. A recognized component is one whose complete safety in its application cannot be evaluated by looking at the component alone, and so conditions of acceptability are placed around its use—so that it has to be used in that specific context in order for it to satisfy the functional safety requirements ... Read more

** This is a sponsored newsletter from Underwriters Laboratories. All the content and sponsored links were provided by Underwriters Laboratories and were not handled by the Automation World editorial staff. Here is our privacy policy with regard to sponsored links.