Fraunhofer IESE supported Hitachi in the development and deployment of dynamic assurance mechanisms in the context of Smart Logistics in order to increase the efficiency of autonomous mobile robots in co-working spaces with humans while ensuring safety at the same time.
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The cooperation between Hitachi and Fraunhofer IESE addressed the research question of how the runtime assurance methods developed at IESE can be used for dynamic risk assessment and conditional safety certificates in order to increase the efficiency and flexibility of autonomous mobile robots in Smart Logistics applications. To this end, the dynamics and variability of the logistics use case was first analyzed systematically in terms of risks and system capabilities, and then transferred into models. These models can be used by runtime monitors to resolve the variabilities in a fully automated way and thus achieve a gain in efficiency compared to classical safety mechanisms, which are typically designed for worst-case assumptions regarding risks and capabilities. The overall concept consisting of a model-based safety engineering method and suitable runtime components was evaluated by way of example in a simulation environment.
The result showed that the speed of the robots and thus the efficiency can be increased, on average, with dynamic safety mechanisms.
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE