Humans working near robot

i am struggling to trust humans who are working on robot safety.

Quote from Zzaz

Non-contact, magnetic, coded safety switches is mounted on the doors of the safeguard. Opening the safeguard doors will trigger the robots safety and it has to be reset outside the cell.

Is this enough safety to guarantee the operators safety while loading the magazine? Or would i have to implement Kuka.SafeOperation?

Depends on how the robot safety is being triggered. If the Safety Gate is opening the Operator Safety or External E-Stop contacts on the robot, then you're safe from the robot moving in Automatic modes. The remaining risks you need to attend to are:

1. Someone else putting the robot in Teach (T1 or T2) and moving the robot while the first operator is inside the fence

2. Someone else closing and locking the door while the first operator is inside the fence, and starting the robot in Automatic modes again.

These are both generally mitigated by having lockout points on the gates, and requiring anyone going inside the fence line to add their own lock to the gate before entering. T2 mode can also be disabled using the robot's Safety signals -- most end users disable T2 entirely unless they really need it for some reason. But here, you've hit a point where Safety relies on training and procedure more than hardware interlocks -- you can provide the lockout points and require their use, but if someone ignores the rules... there's just a limit to how much you can protect people who decline to follow safety procedures.

There's also robot-adjacent safety issues, like: someone enters the gate while the robot is holding a large heavy object overhead. How do you ensure that object doesn't fall off because the air pressure bleeds off, or the operator hits the wrong button on the robot teach pendant? If the robot carries a dangerous tool (cutting blade, drill, etc), how do you ensure the tool is Safely deenergized, but still allows operator control in T1 when necessary? One method is to link EOAT power to the pendant deadman enabler when the robot is in Teach modes -- it's a mitigation, not a cure, but every little bit helps.

Quote from Zzaz

I might be paranoid and, I dont know why, but I am struggling to trust the robots

Never trust them. It's not that the robots are hostile, as much as humans are amazingly good at finding ways to get themselves in the robots' way, and robots are as stupid as they are strong, while humans are very squishy.

robots are mighty. that is why there are specific safety standards just for robots.

there are general machine safety standards that apply to any machine, and then on top of those there are also few specific standards for particularly dangerous categories (press safety, robot safety...)

here is an example from 20 years ago that was done at KUKA in controlled environment

this is just first clip but it does get interesting past 15seconds mark.

then there are people who know nothing or very little about the robots, much less about robot safety, and they try to figure out how to safeguard the cell themselves...

Quote from Zzaz

Thanks for valuable info!

Lockout points is a good idea. Didn't know you could disable T2, ill definitely do that!

There is, or was, a system variable that could enable/disable certain modes. But the easier way might simply be to program the Safety PLC such that it only closes the robot safety interlocks when the robot is in T1 or (AUT or EXT, whichever you're using).

On KRC4 this is done in rights management or by editing .config files (i think it was the SmartHMI.exe.Standard.config).

in KRC2 one could edit PROGRESS.INI and set

KUNDEN_VERSION=3

Yep, KUNDEN_VERSION was the variable I was thinking of. I couldn't remember if the KSS 8 used the same variable, or moved that setting to one of the XML files.