SPRY347 June 2022
Functional safety is a part of an overall safety structure that depends on a system or equipment to operate correctly in response to its inputs. In other words, functional safety is the ability to detect a potentially dangerous condition and activate a protective or corrective device or mechanism to prevent hazardous events from arising, or providing mitigation to reduce the consequence of the hazardous event [3]. In the context of industrial robots, mechanical, electrical, and/or sensor technologies are used to minimize interference with human activities and create safer working environments.
A typical industrial robot safety-related system consists of sensors, a logic subsystem (for data processing and communication, local or to the network), software implementation of algorithms, and actuators (a control subsystem). Microcontrollers (MCUs) and/or processors comprise the logic subsystem. MCU design and architecture plays a role in the system’s overall safety architecture. Designing a system where the processor takes functional safety requirements into consideration, both from a hardware and software standpoint, greatly reduces the cost and complexity of designing a functionally safe system. Two standards govern the requirements for and implementation of functional safety in industrial robots:
For a comprehensive description of functional safety requirements and implementation in factory automation, see the white paper, The state of functional safety in Industry 4.0.