Safety Not Guaranteed

Roberta Nelson Shea is a force of nature. She commands a room, cuts to the heart of the matter, and then utterly disarms you with a one-liner like, “Nowadays you can have ‘cage-free’ [robots], which I think only applies to chickens.”

My first exposure to Universal Robotics’ Global Technical Compliance Officer was also my first Engelberger Awards, and all the pomp it entails. While Nelson Shea appeared to enjoy the well-deserved victory lap, safety and compliance are not – generally speaking – the paths careers one chooses when seeking out a career in the spotlight.

(Robotics newsletter writer, on the other hand…)

It’s clear from speaking with her for even a few moments that she’s one of the lucky ones – those among us who truly found their calling.  For Nelson Shea, it’s industrial safety. She calls the topic her “passion” during the latest episode of the Automated podcast, before noting,

I really, truly believe we can do better with our machinery.  If we do it from the get-go, we want to make sure we don't have sharp corners. We want to make sure we have smooth surfaces. We want to make sure that we can safely control speeds of the robot, because that has a great influence on the potential of injury and the severity of injury. We keep challenging ourselves to find more ways by which to make more safety be built into robots and to be integrated and deployed.

Nelson Shea adds that safety was a key hurdle to automation’s early deployment in industry settings. Workers were, understandably, concerned that these massive, kinetic hunks of metal added another potential dimension of danger to the factory floor.

“If you do a job manually, you know what the risks are that you're putting yourself through,” she explains. “Sometimes it could be high risk. Lifting up something heavy all day long, sooner or later, you will have a back. Later workers embraced it. Robots were being used to do the work that was not good for workers between either breaking or injuring bodies.”

The impression of industry robotics has evolved alongside the safety standards that govern them – which, it seems, is precisely why Nelson Shea won’t be stopping any time soon.

“The whole concept of Functional Safety did not exist when we started in robotics. It does now,” she says. “We do so much with control systems, sensors,  and actuators now and that are done safely that it's inconceivable to the person that I was 15 years ago.”