COVR

The project COVR – Being safe around collaborative and versatile robots in shared workspaces was focused on the development of best practices and guidelines for the improvement of safety of collaborative robots and systems, aiming at promoting test procedures to support in the design and verification of safety in human-robot interaction in shared workspaces.

The domain-transversal approach, transversal with respect to the different application fields, was aimed at filling the gap between standardization and technological advancements, applying several domains, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, agrifood. WIthin the COVR project, 3 call for awards were promoted, open to small consortia composed by robots and component producers, system integrators, final users, universities and research centers. 60 projects were funded, with about 5 million Euros in total. These projects, focused on safety in human robot interaction, dealt with several topics, like the development of new applications in several domains, component development, approaches for risk assessment and validation.

Short reports of the developed projects are available in this section of COVR Toolkit. The Toolkit, freely available online, supports the developments of a collabprative robotics application in all its phases, providing:

• inspiration for new applications through the case stories;
• a list of Directives and standards, filtered based on the specific application and field;
• 32 validation protocols, applicables to different condition and types of application;
• legal information about human-robot collabpration;
• instructions for risk assessment;
• a list of equipment for safety validation;
• a list of relevant publications.

The Consortium collaborated with Standardization Bodies at national level (mainly UNI and DS) and international (CEN and ISO) for the development of guidelines and pre-standardization documents dealing with safety in human-robot interaction. These activities lead to:

• the pubblication of the  CEN Workshop Agreement “Guidelines for the development and use of safety testing procedures in human-robot collaboration”;
• the startup of the Working Group 8 “Validation methods for collaborative applications” within the ISO/TC 299 – Robotics, in which the ISO PAS 5672 “Test methods for measuring forces and pressures in human-robot contacts and collisions” is now under development.