Acceleration and Deceleration Behavior Monitoring and Runtime-Verification for Mobile Manipulators

For today’s automation processes in production facilities, mobile manipulators are used more and more often. Such robot systems often operate in a shared space with humans or even operate together with workers implementing Human-Robot-Collaboration (HRC) tasks. Thus, physical safety properties that are highly influenced by acceleration and deceleration characteristics of robot parts and workpieces are of special interest for verification. Currently, there is only one relevant US standard that describes safety-related aspects in the operation of mobile manipulators directly. Based on the requirements of this standard, in this paper concepts and methods for monitoring and safety verification based on the robot’s acceleration and deceleration characteristics of a mobile manipulator are discussed.