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Automated Maintainability Records and Robot Safety.

Etherton JR

1987 Proceedings of the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium 1987:135-140

00179555

The effects of safety on maintainability characteristics of robotized manufacturing systems were explored. Downtime and corrective maintenance procedures were considered in regard to how they were affected by the level of hazard for different corrective maintenance tasks on robotized industrial workstations. Safety methods for robot maintenance needed to take into account use of diagnostic devices to identify failure and reduce exposure; ensure safe stops and safe access routes into the robot workspace; and make sure that the restart was safe. In order to help maintenance and safety personnel identify undesirable tradeoffs between safety requirements and ease of repair, it was necessary to determine if the degree of safeguarding was adequate for the level of hazard in the existing production system, and if a greater degree of safeguarding was warranted if changes were made in the design of the corrective maintenance task. A computerized maintenance data collection system was invaluable in determining maintainability. The author concludes that automated maintainability records are useful to safety analysts when determining the effectiveness of proposed protection schemes for the personnel who perform corrective maintenance on industrial robotized systems, and to maintenance analysts when assessing the relative effect on safety of actions to minimize corrective maintenance downtime.

Automation; Safety-engineering; Analytical-methods; Industrial-safety; Task-performance; Safety-measures; Machine-operation; Equipment-design;