Modelling the safety of a semi-autonomous wheelchair

Safety is important to a robot that is used in a way that can impact on the wellbeing of people. However, understanding and managing the safety information of a robot is not a trivial task. The quantity of this information is large, and it is usually stored in text-based formats. These factors mean that maintaining safety information when it changes is error prone, and understanding it requires manually searching through lengthy reports. In this paper, we demonstrate that a robot´s safety information can be stored in a model-based format. We use the SafeML modelling language to model the results of a safety analysis performed on a semi-autonomous wheelchair. We then illustrate and discuss the benefits of storing and managing safety information using a model, both to maintainability of the information and to understanding the safety of the robot.