FACTS
- Robots operating at high speed or with high force can cause serious injury when unexpected contact occurs, due to insufficient modelling of human-body dynamics in collisions.
- Lack of comprehensive sensors and validation for transient contact (i.e., brief collisions or sand-wiched contact) remains a major hazard in human-robot collaborative environments.
- Many HRI systems still rely on standard risk assessment methods that do not fully capture dynamic human motion or unpredictable human behaviour, creating safety blind spots.
- Poorly defined workspace boundaries or overlap zones where humans and robots share space increase risk of pinching, trapping or collisions such as when humans enter a robot’s cell unexpectedly.
- Maintenance and setup phases of robot systems present heightened hazard: workers often enter robot envelopes, disable guards, or face unexpected robot activation.
- Psychosocial and organisational hazards are emerging in HRI: e.g., increased stress when humans work alongside robots that behave unpredictably or when trust is low, which can lead to distraction or errors and thereby physical hazard.
STATS
- AI-enabled robots have reduced factory accidents by up to 25% in US manufacturing facilities through enhanced collision avoidance and predictive monitoring.
- By 2025, over 16 million service robots are deployed worldwide, with 57% AI-enabled for safer human interactions; in the US and Canada, this includes 620,000 units in elderly care and healthcare settings to minimize worker exposure to hazards.
- In the US, 52% of large hospitals use autonomous AI logistics robots for internal deliveries, reducing patient handling injuries by 18.4% via safe human-robot coordination.
- From 2020-2025, collaborative robots (cobots) in Canadian manufacturing increased by 60%, with safety features like power and force limiting preventing an estimated 20% of potential interaction-related incidents.
- US workplaces adopting AI-driven human-robot interaction (HRI) systems report 30% lower service costs and 45% annual growth in voice-controlled industrial robotics, improving safety in high-risk tasks.
- In Canada, 70% of organizations using cobots cite AI for ergonomics and safety as key, reducing ergonomic injuries by 15-20% through adaptive task allocation in shared workspaces.