SENSORY-BASED SAFEGUARDING OF ROBOTIC SYSTEMS

Developing acceptable safety levels for industrial robots is a critcal concern that becomes increasingly challenging as robots become larger, faster, and more sophisticated in function. This paper presents a multilevel system for contributing to robot safety by the use of sensory information in partially defined environments, including provision for sensory preprocessing, sensory fusion, and high-level decision making. Sensory fusion is achieved by using Dempster's rule of combination on a set of belief fuctions generated from the input sensory data The high-level decision making is done using an object-oriented, frame-based representation of the safety system architecture.