Proposal of architecture and implementation process for IEC61508 compliant, dependable robot systems

Recent years have seen an increase in demand for robots that work closely with humans, or operate at disaster sites. These robots need to have high dependability. At the same time, the idea of system development based on standards is becoming important especially in the field of embedded systems including robots. IEC61508, which is a standard of functional safety requires the V-model of the engineering process and keeping the documents and programs of each phase consistent. However, this process costs a lot and freedom still remains about the choice of tools to support the development, the way of describing specifications/programs in each phase and so on. This makes consideration of the concrete development process and the tools used there before starting an actual development important. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to present a concrete architecture and a development process that is IEC61508 ready. We especially focus on the software aspect and mention related standards as well.