The brief
Wherever machines work autonomously or semi-autonomously in production, or material is moved automatically, the safety of the production process takes absolute priority, especially where people and machines work together in a confined space. Machines must shut down without delay if a malfunction endangers the life or health of people. Safety-relevant areas close to the machine should therefore be safeguarded so that the machine is immediately brought to a safe state whenever someone enters them.
The solution
To safeguard static safety zones in autonomous or semi-autonomous production, NewTec recommends a system based on laser grids. Two overlapping grids provide close-meshed monitoring of the boundary to the critical area. For the control, a two-channel architecture based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and our SafeFlex board is an excellent fit. The two-channel design delivers a high level of fault and failure safety. Further benefits include extensive parallelisation of the grid control and response times in the millisecond range.
