What are the Guidelines for Safe Collaborative Robot Design and Implementation?

The guidelines are set out in six documents.

• Introduction - Introduces working with collaborative robots, summarises important cobot-specific hazards and safety measures, and outlines the five design principles to create a cobot-safe workplace.
• Cobot Safety Flyers - Easy-to-read one-pagers that summarise key information for non-technical experts/stakeholders and can be printed and shared separately from the rest of the guidelines.
• Guidance on Safe Human-Cobot Interaction - A comprehensive explanation of what human-cobot interaction means and how to safely program and test a cobot for interactive tasks.
• Designing a Safe Cobot Workplace - Outlines the individual roles and responsibilities of people involved in the planning and management of a safe cobot workplace over its whole life cycle.
• Cobot Workplace Safety Checklists - Intuitive, step-by-step checklists that highlight important safety aspects of human-cobot collaboration in a shared workplace.
• Cobot Work Health and Safety Risk Assessment - Designed to identify and control potential risks in a human-cobot collaborative shared workplace across its lifecycle.

What are the benefits?

• The use of cobots in Australian workplaces is rapidly increasing. Cobots offer workers and businesses the opportunity to complete repetitive tasks more efficiently. But with this new technology comes new risks to the health and safety of workers in these changing environments.
• The Guidelines for Safe Collaborative Robot Design and Implementation offer businesses evidence-based tools to help review and analyse the implementation or ongoing management of cobots in their workplaces.
• They have been extensively tested and analysed to increase the work health and safety outcomes for businesses and workers alike.

Getting Started

Get started by downloading the guidelines:

• Introduction
• Cobot Safety Flyers
• Guidance on Safe Human-Cobot Interaction
• Designing a Safe Cobot Workplace
• Cobot Workplace Safety Checklists
• Cobot Work Health and Safety Risk Assessment
  • Printable Risk Assessment Matrix