Thanks for those thoughts. We mostly route with eps foam so fire risk should be lower than wood. We have some interlocking set up, if I hit the emergency stop then the cutter stops which is a good start but is there a way to trigger an emergency stop under other settings. Definitely getting too fancy, but some machine vision that tracks if the part is knocked loose on the table would be sick, will definitely not be allotted the time at work to implement that.
Thinking back on the past two years my main collisions have been with part of the stock that I did not sufficiently rough out. I think I will literally graph out the severity and likelihood of some failures I might expect and plan accordingly. We do a mix of types of routes, some are small and finicky while others have long sweeping passes so I can see where I would differentiate in my risk assessment between these different types.