FELICE-Update: Risk Assessment

When developing a collaborative system with different interacting entities, it is important to assess where risks to health and safety may arise. As part of the FELICE project, IfADo researchers are tackling this task by assessing, categorizing and evaluating various risks that may arise when interacting and collaborating with a robot colleague.

The FELICE project is based on a network of four different entities: The cobot, the adaptive workstation, the organizing AI (called the orchestrator) and, of course, the human. They all interact with each other in the workflow - the cobot passes on tools, the worker retrieves information from the adaptive workstation, or the orchestrator calibrates the cobot. This interaction between the different actors may lead to various risks. In addition to the classic ergonomic or physical risks, the global and local shift structure, which is an integral part of the project, should not lead to a mismatch of responsibilities between the AI and the human, for example, or constraints forming a lack of cognitive team coherence between robot and human.

If the robot drops a tool in the workshop, this may only delay the work process, but more serious incidents must be avoided. This also requires training the worker on how to deal with such risks and promoting situational awareness.