As a general trend in industrial robotics, an increasing number of safety functions are being developed or re-engineered to be handled in software rather than by physical hardware such as safety relays or interlock circuits. This trend reinforces the importance of supplementing traditional, input-based testing and quality procedures which are widely used in industry today, with formal verification and model-checking methods. To this end, this paper focuses on a representative safety-critical system in an ABB industrial paint robot, namely the High-Voltage electrostatic Control system (HVC). The practical convergence of the high-voltage produced by the HVC, essential for safe operation, is formally verified using a novel and general co-verification framework where hardware and software models are related via platform mappings. This approach enables the pragmatic combination of highly diverse and specialised tools. The paper's main contribution includes details on how hardware abstraction and verification results can be transferred between tools in order to verify system-level safety properties. It is noteworthy that the HVC application considered in this paper has a rather generic form of a feedback controller. Hence, the co-verification framework and experiences reported here are also highly relevant for any cyber-physical system tracking a setpoint reference.

In this paper we present an experimental study on real-time collision avoidance with potential fields that are based on 3D point cloud data and processed on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The virtual forces from the potential fields serve two purposes. First, they are used for changing the reference trajectory. Second they are projected to and applied on torque control level for generating according nullspace behavior together with a Cartesian impedance main control loop. The GPU algorithm creates a map representation that is quickly accessible. In addition, outliers and the robot structure are efficiently removed from the data, and the resolution of the representation can be easily adjusted. Based on the 3D robot representation and the remaining 3D environment data, the virtual forces that are fed to the trajectory planning and torque controller are calculated. The algorithm is experimentally verified with a 7-Degree of Freedom (DoF) torque controlled KUKA/DLR Lightweight Robot for static and dynamic environmental conditions. To the authors knowledge, this is the first time that collision avoidance is demonstrated in real-time on a real robot using parallel GPU processing.

The focus of this paper is our recent real-world demonstration using an industrial robot certified for running in explosive atmospheres (ATEX). The demonstration is run amidst live and running hydrocarbon processes and involves autonomous valve manipulation and thermal inspection operations. The valve manipulation operation involves sensor-based movements which implies that the robot trajectories have not been programmed a priori (off-line). In particular, an approach will be presented to sense and avoid over-tightening/loosening of the valve. To the best of our knowledge, this prototype is the first system that performs sensor-based close-contact operations in a real operational environment.

Given the importance and focus of the oil and gas industry related to safety, environmental impact, cost efficiency and increased production, the potential for more extensive use of automation in general, and robotic technology in particular, is evident. The specific role of robots in this context will be to perform various inspection and manipulation operations which human field operators perform today. In this paper, we initially present an overview of the current trends and challenges within the oil and gas industry. This is followed by the latest results from our work towards realizing next generation robotized oil and gas facilities. These activities encompass indoor lab experiments, as well as outdoor demonstrations onsite. The onsite demonstration reported in this paper has been completed together with Shell and comprises the world's first prototype of a robot performing automatic scraper handling in real operational environments.