Cooperation Between a High-Power Robot and a Human by Functional Safety

In industrialized countries, high wages, a declining number of skilled workers, and other issues, have led to a need for the establishment of new highefficiency and high-reliability production systems capable of maintaining high international competitiveness. This particular issue could be addressed with a form of human-robot cooperative production (in which the robot provides supplementary support so that the human operator can devote him- or herself to highly difficult, high-value-added work), which requires the establishment of technologies for ensuring human safety. In this research, the authors propose the application of functional safety that is realized by combining position, speed, and force monitoring, and the authors have realized cooperation between a human operator and an inherently high-speed, highpower robot, as well as cooperative work implemented by a human operator while touching an automatically operated robot.