Canadian Occupational Safety

14 Canadian Occupational Safety www.cos-mag.com Canadian Occupational Safety www.cos-mag.com HAND-IN-GRIPPER New technology is enabling robots in car manu work right beside their By Amanda Silliker L ast July, a robot killed a contract worker in a Volkswa- gen plant in Germany. The 22-year-old was in the process of setting up the robot when it grabbed and crushed him against a metal plate. A spokesperson for the car manufacturer said human error was to blame, rather than a problem with the robot itself. The incident made headlines worldwide and started a Twitter frenzy. It even prompted the Robotic Industries Association in Ann Arbor, Mich., to release a statement on robot safety, noting safety standards to keep workers safe and the requirement for manufac- turers to incorporate a number of safety features in each robot. "Robots seem to get a really bad rap when they're probably some of the most reliable, proven technology out there," says Ken McLaughlin, general manager of JMP Automation in London, Ont. Fatalities involving industrial robots have occurred at an average rate of one per year over the past 15 years, according to the Occu- pational Safety and Health Administration in the United States. As pointed out in a blog by Robotiq, an industrial robotic gripper manufacturer based in Saint-Nicolas, Que., you are more likely to be killed by a shark (fi ve deaths yearly on a global scale) than a robot. Still, employers in the automotive industry need to be aware of the risks robots pose and know how to keep workers safe, especially with more and more robots working side-by-side their human counterparts. Robots are used in a variety of applications in the automotive industry, the most common being welding. The fastest growing applications for robot orders in North America in 2014 were arc welding (up 58 per cent) and spot welding (up 57 per cent), according to the Robotic Industries Association. Welding is used in car manufacturing for the assembly of a vehicle's body, motor and gearbox. "It's fractions of a second that it's making contact with the metal being welded. You might have one robot doing 20 to 30 welds on each application as it goes by," says Jim Van Kessel, vice-chair of CSA Z434-14 Industrial robots and robot systems committee and owner of JVK Industrial Automation in Kitch- ener, Ont. Robotic vision systems are common in car manufacturing to conduct quality checks. Robots are also used for painting and coating, installing windshields and stamping and cutting out parts from sheet metal. At the Honda car manufacturing plant in Alliston, Ont., — which makes the Civic and CR-V — robots are used for a wide range of applications, including spot and mig welding, painting, applying sealer and material handling, says Dave Smith, equip- ment and construction safety specialist at Honda of Canada Manufacturing and chair of the ISO/TC299 – Robots and robotic devices committee. A robot is the most dangerous when it is fi rst introduced on the shop fl oor because safety fences haven't been put in place yet, says Van Kessel. "The robot gets put on the fl oor, the fi rst thing (the workers) want to do is get power to it, get it moving, so they can start the whole process up. They want it wide open so everybody can get involved and that's when high risks start to develop," he says. "There are too many people involved and the safeguards aren't in place yet." Once the robot is erected, contact, struck by or caught between are the risk factors in a robotic cell, says Van Kessel. Typically, maintenance workers are the ones who are going to be injured. "They need power to do things, to troubleshoot what's going wrong," he says. "And it could be cleanup staff that are going into the robot and not following proper lockout and control and energy control; they are getting struck by the robot." Sometimes other workers need to enter the cell for teaching, programming or program verifi cation, so they put the robot in manual reduced speed mode. Engineers at Honda use a teaching pendant to manually program the robots, which has a three-posi- tion enabling switch. In the case of an emergency, if the worker grips the teaching pendant fully or releases it, the robot stops. Another safety measure Honda employs is a key system. If a worker has to go into a cell and a full energy lockout is not suit- able, he needs to take a key with him. If there are not enough keys — which ensure the drive power to the robot can't go back on — then other people can't go in, says Smith. "We back that up with administrative controls, so we are very tight. If you go into a cell and you don't take your key, there are consequences for that," he says. All of its robotic cells meet the CSA Z434 stan- dard and they are barricaded with safety fencing that is six feet high. "At operator loading stations, we have light curtains, laser scanners and safety mats to ensure people can't get into the cell with- out triggering it to stop," says Smith. As per the CSA standard, every robot is required to have a protective stop function and an emergency stop function. At Honda, a robot opera- tor will spend several weeks at the robot WORKING

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