SASSI: Safety Analysis using Simulation-based Situation Coverage for Cobot Systems

Assessing the safety of collaborative robot (cobot) systems is a difficult task due to the myriad of possible interactions between robots and operators, and the potential for injury to the operators. Using a situation coverage approach we can dene the individual components of such interactions, and thereby describe the problem space and the coverage achieved when testing it. In this paper, we propose a situation coverage approach for testing the safety of a cobot system. Our approach suggests using a combination of safety analysis techniques and simulation-based testing to dene situations of interest and explore hazardous situations while only endangering virtual operators. We challenge our assumptions by applying our method to an example based on a realworld use-case. The proposed metrics, if they provide no advantage to guided test generation techniques over random ones, helped us trim the generated conguration landscape to identify safety gaps.