NREC is committed to improving the safety of our systems throughout all phases of the development process.  We have 15 years experience in developing safety systems for a wide variety of industrial, commercial and military robots. Our goal is to fulfill the promise of robotics to keep people out of harm’s way.  

Safety Engineering

NREC engineers work closely with customers to ensure that their safety requirements are met.   We can design systems to meet military or commercial safety standards, such as United States MIL-STD 882D, the European Union’s ATEX directives for explosive environments, and ANSI and ISO safety standards such as ANSI B56.5 (Safety Standard for Guided Industrial Vehicles and Automated Functions of Manned Industrial Vehicles).   

NREC engineers follow common safety engineering practices: hazard analysis and tracking, fault tree and FMEA analysis, verification and validation, and reporting.  Our systems have numerous built-in mechanical, electronic, and software safety features. Watchdog processes help to maintain safe operation despite dropped communications, poor operator commands, and similar problems. 

NREC systems can include a Safety Monitor – an independent, built-in safety watchdog that enforces a set of rules for safe behavior. These rules can include speed limits, “no-go” zones where the robot cannot enter, and other limits on their actions.   When one of these rules is violated, the Safety Monitor puts the system into safe mode. For example, if a robot exceeds its speed limit, the Safety Monitor can stop the vehicle or force it to slow down.  This reduces the need for physical barriers and large stand-off distances.   Additionally, these behavior-based safety rules can be reliably tested to validate and certify overall system safety. 

Both commercial and defense customers may require unmanned systems to undergo safety certification before being commercialized or fielded.   NREC works closely with clients and certifying organizations to formally validate the safe behavior of our systems.  For example, we've successfully built and maintained safety cases for large, fast-moving UGVs with the Department of Defense.