Health & Safety

This ABB IRB 6700 can lift 235Kg and reach out 2.65 metres from its mounting point. It is built mainly from aluminium castings and when it swings at full extent it can reach velocities of up to 8 metres per second. A strike on the head from one of these robots is more likely to be fatal than not.

A good safety engineer may be reducing the chance of a failure from once in 10 years to sometimes less than once in 10,000 years. That requires understanding Robots safety and understanding Quantitative risk assessment.

A bad safety person puts a sign on a hot tap warning of hot water or by the school pond saying "danger deep water" when its only 60cm deep.

To see what I do look at the items on the menu above.

Basic Health & Safety

Some years ago now, I developed and implemented the basic health and safety standard which generated specific risk control standards for genuine risks in my company Nexus Alpha Ltd including;

• specific equipment, substance and sites hazards.

Guidance and rules were laid down in relation to;

• signage, inspection, testing, maintenance, information, training, supervision, protection, containers, fire, electricity and first aid.

I handled the introduction of the health and safety system which existed as series of quality standards and thus formed a natural part of the quality system. See Quality.

Obviously I had to look at the Heath and Safety at Work Act and various statutory instruments. See Law. (I tend to find that guidelines to such things either contain too many opinions of the author not contained in the original, or are lacking in rigour and detail. Occasionally they do help to illuminate a difficult points and can contain reference to important case law that cannot be appreciated by reading the original acts.) My objective was to condense out what was essential to the business of Nexus Alpha Ltd and embody it in the rules in a series of standards. This was done.

Documentation for the resulting health and safety system is owned by me and used by Nexus Alpha Ltd and I have now applied the principles elsewhere.