Robot Emergency Stop

[Kōkaku kidōtai]

Hello everybody,

I wanted to ask you about your experience with emergency stop of the robot (no particular type).

What is the best way to handle emergency stop and how the robot itself is stopped?

Is it only mechanical brake or some sort of comination of electrical/mechanical break?

How it influence robot components?

How to integrate robot into safety system to guarantee safe operation and not damage the robot at the same time?

Regards

[TygerDawg]

The ESTOP will normally halt execution of the program, apply brakes, bring the arm to a state of stopped motion, and remove energy from the servos.  If the arm is moving quickly & carrying a heavy inertial load, then there will be motion of the arm until it is able to come to an abrupt stop.  ESTOPs are for emergencies and should be avoided since they wear out the brakes and over-exercise the power electronics.

Modern controllers will maintain the program pointer at the last program statement.  Then you may re-start the system and continue from the last program statement.  Some languages are sophisticated enough that you may enable error trapping routines to bring the system down in a nice manner after ESTOP, done through custom programming.

Any ESTOP should be run through a safety relay to meet modern safety standards.  The system can only be re-started after manually re-enabling the safety relay.

If you are just learning about this, then you should purchase the ANSI/RIA 15.06-99 standard (or whatever the latest version is).  You may also learn about safety system functions & standards from vendor catalogs (Allen-Bradley, Sick, Banner, others).