Safety-critical advanced robots: A survey

Developing advanced robotics applications is now facing the safety issue for users, the environment, and the robot itself, which is a main limitation for their deployment in real life. This safety could be justified by the use of dependability techniques as it is done in other safety-critical applications. However, due to specific robotic properties (such as continuous human-robot physical interaction or non deterministic decisional layer), many techniques need to be adapted or revised. This paper reviews the main issues, research work and challenges in the field of safety-critical robots, linking up dependability and robotics concepts.