Industrial Safety Solutions for Machine Guarding & Automation

Industrial safety solutions combine safeguarding devices, safety-related control functions, machine design measures and validation to reduce risk around hazardous industrial equipment.

The appropriate solution depends on the machine, hazard, personnel access route, stopping behavior and required safety function. A safety sensor should therefore be selected as part of the complete machine safeguarding concept rather than as an isolated component.

Start by identifying the hazard and determining how a person can reach or enter the hazardous area. Then define what the protective device must detect and what safe machine response must follow.

Typical factors include point-of-operation access, opening or perimeter geometry, approach direction, required detection capability, machine stopping time, restart behavior and the required safety performance of the complete control system.

A safety light curtain is generally well suited to a defined opening or access line between an emitter and receiver.

A safety laser scanner is generally more suitable when the required protective zone is two-dimensional or when flexible field geometry is needed around machinery, robot cells or mobile equipment.

Final selection still depends on the risk assessment, required safety function, stopping behavior and application geometry.

A safety laser scanner is selected for a safety-related protective function, such as personnel protection or protective area monitoring.

Standard industrial 2D LiDAR is used for general sensing tasks such as detection, measurement, environmental perception or configuration-dependent scan-data applications.

Similar scanning principles do not make the two device categories interchangeable. A standard industrial LiDAR should not be substituted for a required safety-rated protective device.

Press machine safeguarding frequently requires protection around the point of operation where an operator loads, positions or removes workpieces. Safety light curtains are one commonly used technology for defined access paths, but suitability cannot be determined from the machine type alone.

The application must also consider machine stopping time, approach direction, required detection capability and the resulting safeguard position. See the Press Machine Safety application guide for the dedicated application discussion.

Yes. The same mobile robot can require separate sensing technologies for different functions.

A safety laser scanner can form part of the safety-related protective function, while industrial 2D LiDAR can be used for obstacle detection, environmental perception or, in selected configurations, raw scan data for navigation.

These functions should be defined and evaluated separately. See the AGV Safety application guide for the application-level discussion.