Towards Declarative Safety Rules for Perception Specification Architectures
This addresses safety issues for agricultural robotics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing standards and focuses on a specific verification method.
The paper tackled the problem of ensuring safety in agricultural field robots by analyzing a vision pipeline in connection with functional-safety standards, and demonstrated a simple verification mechanism to improve system safety.
Agriculture has a high number of fatalities compared to other blue collar fields, additionally population decreasing in rural areas is resulting in decreased work force. These issues have resulted in increased focus on improving efficiency of and introducing autonomy in agriculture. Field robots are an increasingly promising branch of robotics targeted at full automation in agriculture. The safety aspect however is rely addressed in connection with safety standards, which limits the real-world applicability. In this paper we present an analysis of a vision pipeline in connection with functional-safety standards, in order to propose solutions for how to ascertain that the system operates as required. Based on the analysis we demonstrate a simple mechanism for verifying that a vision pipeline is functioning correctly, thus improving the safety in the overall system.