Digital Shadows of Safety for Human Robot Collaboration in the World-Wide Lab

The World Wide Lab (WWL) connects the Digital Shadows (DSs) of processes, products, companies, and other entities allowing the exchange of information across company boundaries. Since DSs are context- and purpose-specific representations of a process, as opposed to Digital Twins (DTs) which offer a full simulation, the integration of a process into the WWL requires the creation of DSs representing different aspects of the process. Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) for assembly processes was recently studied in the context of the WWL where Behaviour Trees (BTs) were proposed as a standard task-level representation of these processes. We extend previous work by proposing to standardise safety functions that can be directly integrated into these BTs. This addition uses the WWL as a communication and information exchange platform allowing industrial and academic practitioners to exchange, reuse, and experiment with different safety requirements and solutions in the WWL.