Industry is witnessing an ever-increasing interest towards collaborative robotic applications, which promise an increase in both flexibility and efficiency together with an improvement of human operators’ working conditions. As a consequence, new challenges have arisen and, with them, more safety issues as well. As a matter of fact, whereas traditional robotic applications consist in robots performing operations within a segregated workspace, in such a way that humans cannot get close to them when they are operating, in human-robot collaborative applications (commonly referred to as HRC applications) humans share the same workspace occupied by robots. This clearly entails that contacts between them are more likely to occur and, therefore, particular attention must be put into the design of the system, in order to try to reduce hazardous situations as much as possible. This Thesis is part of a project that aims at developing a comprehensive approach to perform safety analysis of collaborative applications, with respect to mechanical hazards due to unintended contacts between humans and robots, by exploiting formal methods; in particular, a tool-supported model-driven approach to perform risk reduction on human-robot collaborative applications is introduced, in such a way to make available to system designers and safety assessors, who usually do not own a strong background on formal modelling and verification, a tool allowing them to study the effects that certain risk reduction measures have on the collaborative application being analysed and, possibly, assisting them in choosing the most effective risk reduction measures. At the core of this procedure is SAFER-HRC methodology, according to which the formal logic models describing the collaborative applications are generated; this generation can be done automatically by means of a tool - which has been updated and improved with this work - that solely requires UML diagrams representing the considered collaborative application. As such, the users of such tool only need to have a basic knowledge about UML, since it is the language with which collaborative applications are modelled.
L’industria sta assistendo ad un interesse sempre maggiore verso le applicazioni robotiche collaborative, le quali promettono un incremento sia nella flessibilità, sia nell’efficienza, insieme ad un miglioramento delle condizioni di lavoro umane. Di conseguenza, sono sorte nuove sfide e, con esse, anche un maggior numero di problemi legati alla sicurezza. Difatti, mentre nella robotica industriale tradizionale i robot compiono le loro operazioni in spazi isolati, così che avvicinarsi ad essi mentre sono operativi sia impedito agli esseri umani, nelle applicazioni di robotica collaborativa gli esseri umani condividono il medesimo spazio di lavoro occupato dai robot. Chiaramente questo comporta una maggiore probabilità che avvengano contatti fra di loro e, perciò, occorre porre particolare attenzione nella progettazione del sistema, al fine di ridurre il più possibile le situazioni di pericolo. Questa Tesi è parte di un progetto che mira a sviluppare un approccio esaustivo per condurre analisi di sicurezza su applicazioni collaborative, riguardo a pericoli di tipo meccanico dovuti a contatti indesiderati fra esseri umani e robot, sfruttando metodi formali; in particolare, viene introdotto un approccio basato su modelli logici e supportato da uno strumento automatico che permette di effettuare procedure di riduzione del rischio su applicazioni collaborative, in modo tale da rendere disponibile a system designers e safety assessors, i quali solitamente non possiedono un solido background su modellazione e verifica formali, uno strumento che permetta loro di studiare gli effetti che determinate misure di riduzione del rischio hanno sull’applicazione collaborativa analizzata e, eventualmente, assisterli nella scelta delle misure di riduzione del rischio più efficaci. Alla base di questa procedura si trova la metodologia SAFER-HRC, secondo la quale vengono generati i modelli di logica formale che descrivono le applicazioni collaborative; la loro generazione può essere svolta in automatico grazie ad uno strumento - il quale è stato aggiornato e migliorato con questo lavoro - che per fare ciò richiede solamente dei diagrammi UML che rappresentino l’applicazione collaborativa considerata. Come tale, gli utenti di questo strumento necessitano soltanto di una conoscenza basilare del linguaggio UML, poiché si tratta del linguaggio con il quale le applicazioni collaborative vengono modellate.
Model-driven risk analysis for the design of safe collaborative robotic applications
BURAN, FEDERICO
2017/2018
Abstract
Industry is witnessing an ever-increasing interest towards collaborative robotic applications, which promise an increase in both flexibility and efficiency together with an improvement of human operators’ working conditions. As a consequence, new challenges have arisen and, with them, more safety issues as well. As a matter of fact, whereas traditional robotic applications consist in robots performing operations within a segregated workspace, in such a way that humans cannot get close to them when they are operating, in human-robot collaborative applications (commonly referred to as HRC applications) humans share the same workspace occupied by robots. This clearly entails that contacts between them are more likely to occur and, therefore, particular attention must be put into the design of the system, in order to try to reduce hazardous situations as much as possible. This Thesis is part of a project that aims at developing a comprehensive approach to perform safety analysis of collaborative applications, with respect to mechanical hazards due to unintended contacts between humans and robots, by exploiting formal methods; in particular, a tool-supported model-driven approach to perform risk reduction on human-robot collaborative applications is introduced, in such a way to make available to system designers and safety assessors, who usually do not own a strong background on formal modelling and verification, a tool allowing them to study the effects that certain risk reduction measures have on the collaborative application being analysed and, possibly, assisting them in choosing the most effective risk reduction measures. At the core of this procedure is SAFER-HRC methodology, according to which the formal logic models describing the collaborative applications are generated; this generation can be done automatically by means of a tool - which has been updated and improved with this work - that solely requires UML diagrams representing the considered collaborative application. As such, the users of such tool only need to have a basic knowledge about UML, since it is the language with which collaborative applications are modelled.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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https://hdl.handle.net/10589/144932