Using the power of innovation to impact the world around us
SIGNALS+ NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTION
Stay updated and leverage Signals+ latest insights, information and ideas on Connectivity, Digital Health, Electrification, and Smart Industry.
Thank you for subscribing to ADI Signals+. A confirmation email has been sent to your inbox.
You'll soon receive timely updates on all the breakthrough technologies impacting human lives across the globe. Enjoy!
Close
Close Details
FUNCTIONAL SAFETY IN INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS: FROM RISK TO RESILIENCE
KEY TAKEAWAYS
|
Industrial robots are no longer confined to cages. Collaborative robotic applications, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), and emerging humanoids now work alongside humans in dynamic and unpredictable settings. This shift is unlocking new levels of productivity, precision, and operational flexibility, but it also raises the bar.
Robotic machines must operate safely, every time, and under all conditions. A high-speed robot arm can deliver enough force to cause injury in milliseconds. As robotics scale and autonomy increases, the margin for error narrows. The question is no longer whether industrial robots can perform. It’s whether they can perform safely, consistently, and predictably under all conditions, and whether the systems governing their operation are designed to ensure that.
WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL SAFETY AND HOW DOES IT HELP?
Functional safety ensures a system performs its safety-related function when required, such as stopping a motor fast enough to prevent injury or forcing a robot to reduce speed and force in the presence of a nearby human. In industrial systems, it mitigates harm from unintended actions. At its core, functional safety depends on the correct operation of the safety system and effective risk reduction, such as automatic protections that respond correctly when a safety demand occurs. It is built into the system’s design and operation as active, intelligent protection.
Three fundamentals define functional safety:
- Reliability: ability to perform as required, without failure, for a given time interval, under given conditions.
- Architectural constraints: failures will occur, and it’s the system’s ability to tolerate faults.
- Systematic integrity: design errors must be prevented, not just hardware failures.
Governing standards such as IEC 61508, ISO 13849-1, and IEC 62061 define how functional safety is designed, verified, and maintained. For industrial robots, ISO 10218 specifies requirements for the fundamental safe design and risk-reduction techniques, including the minimum functional safety performance level for deployed safety functions. These frameworks are grounded in decades of real-world incident data and engineering practice, ensuring automation advances without increasing risk.
RISK IS MULTIDIMENSIONAL AND GROWING
Functional safety starts with risk, and in industrial robotics, risk is complex and constantly evolving. Understanding it requires a structured approach. Risk assessment provides that framework, systematically evaluating not just what a robot is designed to do, but which hazards exist, who is exposed, and how failures could lead to harm.
Risk reduction follows a three-step hierarchy: inherently safe design eliminates hazards at the source, safeguarding measures mitigate residual risk, and information for use ensures operators and integrators understand remaining limitations. This approach is defined in ISO 12100, the core standard for risk assessment and reduction in industrial machinery.
Each safety function is assessed against three core parameters:
- Severity of potential injury
- Frequency and duration of exposure
- Ability to avoid or limit harm
This framework defines a required Performance Level, a measurable benchmark every safety function must meet or exceed.
The challenge is scale and complexity. Modern robotic applications may incorporate dozens of interdependent safety functions, from protective stops to real-time speed-and-separation monitoring. Each must be individually designed and validated, with interactions tightly controlled to ensure the system behaves safely as a whole.
DEALING WITH FAILURE
Functional safety standards distinguish two failure types and how to handle them:
- Random hardware failures: Unpredictable component failures with a finite probability over time. Mitigate with diagnostic coverage requirements and redundancy.
- Systematic failures: Design or process-driven defects (e.g., poor EMC robustness, weak requirements, inadequate V&V, software bugs). Address through rigorous development processes, independent reviews, and diverse redundancy to avoid common-mode failures.
The scope of the challenge is growing quickly. The latest ISO 10218 revision, covering design, operation, and safeguarding requirements for industrial robots, defines 30 discrete safety functions, up from just 12 in the 2011 version. That threefold increase reflects the broader risk profile as robots become more capable and more integrated with human environments. Functional safety in the connected factory must also now address cybersecurity threats.
THREE FOUNDATIONS, ONE INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK
Addressing this complexity requires more than compliance checklists. Functional safety is built on three interdependent pillars: systematic capability, reliability, and architecture. Together, they define how risk is reduced to a tolerable level and how that reduction is achieved, verified, and sustained over time.
Systematic capability refers to the rigor of the development process. Functional safety relies on disciplined engineering workflows that reduce systematic failures caused by design flaws, incomplete specifications, or implementation gaps. Standards-based processes, structured documentation, and rigorous verification and validation all support this capability. A strong process reduces the likelihood of undetected errors in safety-critical functions.
Reliability addresses the hardware dimension. It is the probability of a product performing its intended function without failure under defined conditions over time. In functional safety, it is quantified using metrics such as mean time to dangerous failure (MTTFD) and average frequency of dangerous failure per hour (PFH). These are engineering targets, derived from component data and validated through systematic analysis.
Architecture addresses the reality that no component is infallible. Safety architectures use hardware fault tolerance to prevent a single failure from disabling a safety function. Redundancy, diagnostics, and fault detection work together to maintain protection as components degrade or fail, preserving system integrity over its operational life.
FUNCTIONAL SAFETY AS A DIFFERENTIATOR
Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) approaches functional safety as both a product capability and an engineering discipline aligned with global standards. Its in-house functional safety experts support customers in developing systems that meet relevant certification requirements across a portfolio of safety-capable semiconductors, precision sensing, power and battery management, isolation, and motion control technologies. ADI provides the foundational building-block products, along with reliability data, safety documentation, and standards-based design practices. This enables automotive, industrial, and robotics manufacturers to implement SIL- and ASIL-compliant systems and operate safely in increasingly robotic and human-centric industrial environments.
LOOKING AHEAD: SAFETY AS A STRATEGIC ELEMENT
Functional safety is not a constraint on innovation—it is what makes scaling industrial robotics possible. As robots move deeper into human-centered environments, organizations that embed rigorous safety frameworks will be the ones able to deploy at scale with confidence and earn sustained trust from operators, regulators, and the workforce.
Standards are already evolving for next-generation systems, including humanoid robots and mobile platforms with active stability control. This signals a clear direction: functional safety is advancing in lockstep with robotics innovation. Those who treat it as a core engineering discipline, not an afterthought, will be best positioned to deploy intelligent automation responsibly, effectively, and at scale.
