Environmental Hazard Analysis - a Variant of Preliminary Hazard Analysis for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Dogramadzi, Sanja; Giannaccini, Maria Elena; Harper, Christopher; Woodman, Roger; Sobhani, Mohammad; Choung, Jiyeon

Abstract

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Robot manufacturers will be required to demonstrate objectively that all reasonably foreseeable hazards have been identified in any robotic product design that is to be marketed commercially. This is problematic for autonomous mobile robots because conventional methods, which have been developed for automatic systems do not assist safety analysts in identifying non-mission interactions with environmental features that are not directly associated with the robot’s design mission, and which may comprise the majority of the required tasks of autonomous robots. In this paper we develop a new variant of preliminary hazard analysis that is explicitly aimed at identifying non-mission interactions by means of new sets of guidewords not normally found in existing variants. We develop the required features of the method and describe its application to several small trials conducted at Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the 2011–2012 period.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 27, 2013
• Online Publication Date: Mar 2, 2014
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2014
• Deposit Date: Apr 24, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 11, 2016
• Journal: Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems: Theory and Applications
• Print ISSN: 0921-0296
• Electronic ISSN: 1573-0409
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 76
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 73-117
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-0020-7
• Keywords: hazard analysis, environmental survey, autonomous, mobile robot, safety
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/812249
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-0020-7
• Additional Information: Additional Information : The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-0020-7
• Contract Date: Apr 11, 2016