Safety-oriented flexible design of Autonomous Mobile Robot systems

Current industrial automation applications particularly within the smart manufacturing domain require mobility, flexibility of deployment, and scalability. In addition to these, it is important to mitigate the risk of safety hazards. In this paper we discuss a flexible, granular, and software-based system design that aims to improve both security and safety of an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) based industrial automation systems. The decentralised control architecture ensures that safety-critical functions are distributed throughout the network. To this end, we first define system-level safety requirements and identify procedures required to satisfy safety-critical functions such as emergency-stop (E-Stop). We then explain the benefits provided by the proposed system architecture vis-a-vis its resilience towards potential safety hazards.