Functional Safety Analysis and Design of Sensors in Robot Joint Drive System

The reliable operation of the sensors of robot joint drive systems (RJDs) is a key factor in ensuring the safety of equipment and personnel. Over the years, additional safety-related systems have been designed to prevent safety incidents caused by robot failures, ignoring the functional safety issues of the robot sensors themselves. In view of this, based on IEC61508, a functional safety analysis and design method for sensors of RJDs is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the hazard analysis and risk assessment clarified the goals that the safety protection function of the RJD’s sensor should achieve. Then, by establishing the motor drive model and transmission model, a model-based sensor fault diagnosis and isolation strategy is proposed. Considering the fault-tolerant operation of system, a fail-operational hardware architecture of the safety-related system is designed. Markov analysis shows that the safety integrity level (SIL) of safety-related systems can reach SIL3. Finally, experiments are designed to validate the proposed fault diagnosis and fault tolerance strategy. The results show that the safety-related system can effectively locate sensor failures, realize fault-tolerant control when a single sensor fails and perform safe torque off (STO) protection when multiple sensors fail