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An emerging crop of industrial robots promise to be user-friendly tools for novice users in a wide variety of small companies, but they might be held back by safety standards, experts say.
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An army of user-friendly robots is headed for the factory floor, but it might have to climb over cumbersome safety regulations, according to two pioneers in the field speaking at a workshop Tuesday in San Jose, Calif.
"There's a big market for automating small companies," said Esben Ostergaard, chief technologist at Universal Robots, a Danish company now selling as many as 150 robots a month. Safety regulations that demand multi-page risk assessments and complex danger mitigation schemes threaten progress, he said.
He compared today's safety standards to an 1861 law in England that required all cars to have a person walk in front of them carrying a red flag.
"We can't have systems that are so safe they are useless," he said, noting existing and pending ISO standards. "Our take on safety is it's a moving target."
Read the rest of this article on EE|Times.
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