| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/J18064/01 |
| Title: |
SAFE SYSTEM ARCHITECTURES FOR LARGE MOBILE ROBOTS IED4/1/9315 |
| Principal Investigator: |
Seward, Professor DW |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Project Partners: |
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| Department: |
Engineering |
| Organisation: |
Lancaster University |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research (Pre-FEC) |
| Starts: |
01 September 1993 |
Ends: |
30 September 1996 |
Value (£): |
254,719
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
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| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
| Manufacturing |
Information Technologies |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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To investigate safety issues that concern heavy mobile robots. To study the implications of adopting a safety manager approach to achieving system safety. To demonstrate a feasible architecture on an existing robot excavator. To model the process of constructing a safety argument for a complex non-eterministic system.Progress:Work to date has been concentrated in three main areas - Safety analysis of heavy robots, the production of safety requirements for such systems and the development of the robot excavator hardware platform to enable the feasibility of the proposed safety manager architecture to be tested. An existing requirements software tool VORD (viewpoints oriented requirements definition) has been extended to cover safety issues. Both direct and indirect viewpoints are identified. Direct viewpoints are clients who will use the system (either people or software modules). Indirect viewpoints have an interest in the system (e.g. the Health and Safety Executive). The tool documents viewpoints, highlights conflicts, and assists in specifying requirements. For safety related systems VORD is also used for identifying safety considerations, identifying and analysing hazards and classifying and analysing risks. It can be used with any hazard analysis technique but currently supports fault-trees. It uses AND-OR logic to calculate the probabilities of risks. A new synthesis of hazard analysis techniques has been produced - CLASH (Consequence led analysis of safety and hazards), and this has been found to be more appropriate for this type of system. This is a top-down technique that starts with a list of possible consequences e.g. impact from mechanical hazard. After analysis by a fault-tree-like technique, the results are assessed according to criteria similar to those used in FMECA. Work on the test excavator platform is progressing well with the safety implications of a communications bus being considered.
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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| Date Materialised |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.lancs.ac.uk |