ANSI R15.06, the robotics and robotics systems standard of the American National Standards Institute, is one of a variety of safety-related standards that are currently undergoing reaffirmation.
The thing that’s really unique “is that it is probably one of the most comprehensive standards in three areas,” says Richard Mills, business development manager at Fremont, Calif.-based STI, a supplier of machine safeguarding products.
“The first area covered is risk assessment. The second is implementing new safeguarding technologies. The third is that the responsibility for safeguarding falls not only on the employer but also the operators, machine installers, manufacturers and those who modify the machines.”
Risk assessment, Mills says, “is one of the big differences between the U.S. and European standards. In Europe, they do a risk assessment of the machine. It must be evaluated and then safeguarded before it’s shipped.”
However, “the U.S. looks at safeguarding in the workplace. That’s because the U.S. will ship machines without safeguarding, with the intent that the manufacturer provides the workplace safeguards” for the worker.
Mills says safeguarding after the risk assessment “addresses what types of products should be used to bring the assessed risk to safe and acceptable levels. There is some new safeguarding technology that has not been addressed by older standards.”
Those technologies include, he says, “laser-safety scanners and perimeter guarding. Laser-safety scanners are used for area guarding within a robot cell. There are three types of guarding: point-of-operation, area and perimeter.”
He notes that point-of-operation and perimeter guarding only apply when something passes through that field.
“This is a world-class standard. It will be womb-to-tomb on how to set up a robot cell and make it safe.”
There is also an international revision to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard 10218—Safety of Robots—that began in 2001, says Roberta Nelson Shea, ANSI’s robot-safety-standard committee chair and a member of the board of directors of the Robotic Industries Association.
“We have taken ANSI R15.06 as the base for the international revision. Our meetings and discussions have revolved around making sure the language of the standard is equally understood by the members.”
The biggest thing about this, she says, “is that the international standard applies to suppliers of robots, just as ISO 11161 applies only to suppliers of integrated manufacturing systems.”
