Robots and human interaction in a furniture manufacturing industry - risk assessment

Abstract

In the last decade, a significant increase of robotic solutions’ implementation has been verified across several industrial contexts, including the furniture manufacturing industries. The current study aimed at assessing the risks within different workstations with human-robots interfacing at a large furniture manufacturing company. With this purpose, a questionnaire to collect the workers’ perceptions about risks was developed. For each workstation, the William Fine method was applied, in order to estimate the risk levels and to define the priority of intervention measures. The preliminary results demonstrate that even though some preventive measures are already implemented, the workers are still exposed to different risks (e.g. falls in height). Therefore, several preventive measures should be considered. The current study was also important to the design and implementation of a risk assessment methodology with the workers’ active participation, and the results can be a reference for studies focused on risk assessment in other companies.