Model-Based Engineering, Safety Analysis and Risk Assessment for Personal Care Robots

In this paper, we propose a method and associate platform to couple model-based system engineering and safety analysis at the early phases of robotic system (RS) life-cycle. The method is compatible with IEC12100 and ISO13482. The platform is based on Papyrus UML modeler and supports RobotML, a domain specific language for RSs, as well as tools for safety analysis and risk assessment, Sophia and Safety Architect. It includes an ability (a) to model architecture of RSs; (b) to automatically run safety analysis (e.g. failure mode and effects analysis, fault tree analysis, etc.); (c) to save and reuse safety artefacts; (d) to represent safety analysis results in the modeling environment. We illustrate the proposed method by considering a humanoid personal care robot from SoftBank Robotics developed in the scope of the ROMEO2 project.