ISO 10218 is the safety standard for industrial robots and robot systems, covering design, protective measures and integration, and ISO/TS 15066 extends it to collaborative operation — robots that share space with people, with defined limits on speed, force and separation distance.
ISO 10218
ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066 are what make it lawful to put a robot next to a person. They specify the safety functions, the risk assessment process and, for collaborative operation, the biomechanical limits that determine how fast an arm may move as a human approaches.
- Part 1 and Part 2 - The robot itself, and the integrated system it becomes on a factory floor.
- Collaborative operation - Safety-rated monitored stop, hand guiding, speed and separation monitoring, power and force limiting.
- Risk assessment as the mechanism - The obligation is a documented assessment rather than a fixed rule, which suits varied installations.
- Referenced by regulators - Machinery regulation and workplace safety enforcement lean on these standards rather than restating them.
These standards frame a question this research keeps arriving at from other directions. Speed and separation monitoring is a safety function computed continuously from sensor state — exactly the kind of information an operational API would expose, and The State of Robotics & Autonomous Systems APIs finds two companies in 534 describing an event surface. The safety case is made in a technical file at commissioning; whether it can be observed afterwards by the customer’s own software is a different question, and largely unanswered.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Robotics & Autonomous Systems APIs
Safety functions computed continuously from sensor state — in a market where two companies in 534 describe an event surface a customer could observe.
