Robot Cell Safety Assessment

This assessment is scoped to one robot cell's design and operating mode. Using it to cover the wider machine it feeds, or a conveyor transfer point at the cell boundary, pushes findings into a record that cannot see the whole hazard.

The template splits cleanly along the same lines as the standards it is built against: perimeter and interlocking design from ISO 10218, and the collaborative-specific limits from ISO/TS 15066, which only apply once collaborative mode is confirmed.

ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066 are the reference standards worldwide for robot and collaborative robot safety, but how much weight they carry depends on the certification regime and the customer standards layered on top locally.

The fields are straightforward to answer. The judgement is in deciding what the cell's actual configuration requires, rather than what its paperwork claims.

The recurring gap is not bad guarding design; it is an assessment that described a cell configuration that has since quietly moved on.

A cell was commissioned as collaborative, with the original gripper's force validated at low payload for a light pick-and-place task. Eighteen months later, production added a heavier fixture with a firmer gripper, treated internally as a minor tooling change rather than a new application. The collaborative assessment was never revisited, because nothing about the robot's programming or speed had changed.

A periodic assessment under this template caught it only because Power And Force Limits Validated could not honestly be marked Yes without new measurement. The new gripper's force at the same speed exceeded the biomechanical limit for the finger, and the operation was reclassified as caged pending redesign. The robot's motion had never looked different; the assumption underneath it had been wrong for a year and a half.

The form is the easy part. Catching a quiet tooling or payload change before it invalidates a collaborative assessment, and keeping the reassessment trigger tied to the asset, is the work that actually slips.

KnowSafe

Holds the robot cell assessment library against the asset register, flags when a plant change should have triggered a reassessment, and keeps the residual risk band visible against the schedule.

KnowMaintain

Surfaces end effector, payload or fixture changes logged against the asset so a tooling swap does not slip past the assessment that depends on knowing about it.

KnowTrain

Confirms the assessor and the engineering manager providing the second signature hold current competency for robot cell risk assessment, not general machine safety training.

Ella

Coordinates the crew across sites, rolls completion and exceptions into one view, and holds every write for your approval before it touches a record.

Collaborative robot

A robot validated to share workspace with a person without full perimeter guarding, under specific speed, force, payload and application limits set by the assessment, not an inherent property of the hardware.

Speed and separation monitoring

A collaborative operating method that maintains a protective separation distance and reduces or stops robot speed as a person approaches, rather than relying on contact limits.

Power and force limiting

A collaborative operating method that keeps contact forces and pressures at the end effector below biomechanical injury thresholds, so incidental contact does not cause harm.

Reach envelope

The full three-dimensional space the robot and its end effector can physically occupy, including tooling, which perimeter guarding and safe standing positions must be set against.

Residual risk band

The risk remaining after all controls in the cell are applied, expressed as a band from Low to Extreme; unlike most scores in this library, a higher band here means higher risk, not a better result.