Aerospace Safety System
In mid-2018, a well-known aerospace company tasked AMT with designing a safety system at a test facility. Their current arrangement was an open environment with multiple robots performing tasks without any kind of safety guarding in place to control human access to operating workspaces. The shop personnel relied on the built-in robot e-stops and teach pendants for all safety functions, with no safety PLC monitoring or physical boundaries for individual workspaces.
This system was comprised of one FANUC and eight ABB existing robots, as well as a designated space to accommodate one future robot. The various robot models are designed to use EthernetIP communication protocol. However, the safety PLC is a Siemens device which is connected using protocol known as “Profinet.”
AMT designed a safety system for an existing open 5-by-2 robot cell array. AMT provided a unique safety solution with a customizable configuration which allow the ten individual cells to be grouped in any combination using only a touchscreen interface.