Risk and Safety Aspects for Wall-Climbing Robots

Since the beginning of mobile robots the developers considered safety aspects. The challenge was - and still is - to identify hazards and to find appropriate manners to react on them. This paper presents aspects concerning the safety of wall-climbing robots and discusses different types of hazards (especially those which could cause a drop-off), their impact and how they can be handled. The main challenge is to perform a safety analysis without neither sufficient knowledge about the system nor significant statistical data for evaluation. Here, a fault tree analysis of a wall-climbing robot is performed to identify bottle necks related to safety and to specify requirements to the robot's hard- and software. Finally, some suitable measures are highlighted which improve its safety tremendously.