Study

Robots are escaping their cages. As Industry 4.0 accelerates, manufacturers are shifting from fenced automation to collaborative and even humanoid systems—creating a brand-new safety playbook. This Executive Summary distils fresh insights from a two-phase study:

• A quantitative survey of 203 European automation professionals
• 20 in-depth interviews with end-users, system integrators, and robot manufacturers.

Key take-aways:

• Emerging challenges in safety compliance of fence-free and human-robot collaboration
• The tooling and standards gaps slowing safe deployment
• AI-driven opportunities to predict, mitigate, and achieve safety compliance faster

Use these findings to benchmark your current practices, prioritize investments, and stay ahead of the next wave of collaborative-robot regulations

Authors:

• Mohamed El-Shamouty
• Mrunal Sompura

Editors:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Bauernhansl. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Marco Huber, Dr.-Ing Werner Kraus

Funding

This study was funded by the AI Innovation Center “Learning Systems and Cognitive Robotics.” It is part of a series of studies on the topics of AI and robotics. More information can be found at the following link: https://www.ki-fortschrittszentrum.de/veroeffentlichungen/

Download:

The study is available free of charge here in English.