Risk and Safety Aspects for Wall-Climbing Robots

Since the beginning of mobile robots the developers considered safety aspects. The challenge was – and still is – to identify hazards and to find appropriate manners to react on them. This paper presents aspects concerning the safety of wall-climbing robots and discusses different types of hazards (especially those which could cause a dropoff), their impact and how they can be handled. The main challenge is to perform a safety analysis without neither sufficient knowledge about the system nor significant statistical data for evaluation. Here, a fault tree analysis of a wall-climbing robot is performed to identify bottle necks related to safety and to specify requirements to the robot’s hardand software. Finally, some suitable measures are highlighted which improve its safety tremendously.