Safety-critical WG

Next Generation ROS
24

Here are the minutes for the meeting held on 2019/07/03.

Participants

  • Geoffrey Biggs (Tier IV/The Autoware Foundation)
  • Jacob Hassold (DCS)
  • Lalit Begani (Intel)
  • Matt Droter (ROS Agriculture)
  • Shawn Schaerer (Northstar Robotics)
  • Sohin Shah
  • Victor Mayoral (Acrutronic Robotics)

Discussion

  • Reviewed ideas that have been thrown around so far
  • Sohin gave a presentation on the small lawn tractor application from ROS Agriculture that we are considering for our reference application
    • ros_lawn_tractor_safety.pdf (1.1 MB)
    • A retrofitted lawn tractor, with a Rasperry Pi 3 providing the ROS master and an NVIDIA Jetson Nano for the AI-based perception.
    • The use case is to cover an area while avoiding obstacles
    • The response to (dynamic) obstacles is to just stop and wait for the operator to help
    • Current safety features are:
      • An estop; loss of power to this relay kills the engine
      • A remote kill switch
      • A tele-op deadman switch
    • Ultrasonic range sensors are planned
    • The navigation stack (in ROS 1) has disadvantages for safety, e.g.:
      • The stop response for obstacles causes the local planners to enter recovery behaviours, which eventually leads to the goal being abandoned.
      • Declaring an emergency doesn’t mean anything unless the nodes performing their actions are actually killed.
    • They have designed three different levels of safety threats
    • They have a lot of questions about how to do safety properly
    • They lawn tractor is being used in an agriculture robot challenge (agBOT Challenge), which has quite well-defined environments and goals that could be useful to define a reference application
  • Acutronic has a sample use case they have been using for their security work
    • They are putting together a simple pick-and-place use case using a simple modular robot arm
    • The use case is fairly detailed and an excellent starting point for doing safety work
  • To be clear, we do not intend to produce a set of general safety documentation for using ROS in a safety-critical system, but provide safety documentation for the ROS-related parts of a specific application on a specific robot as an example of how
  • There is an EU project for security and safety being proposed by Acutronic Robotics called RECLAIM
    • If the project gets funded, then Acutronic Robotics believes they can bring in some experts in safety for robotics to contribute to the working group
    • Funding result is expected to be known by the end of the year
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