Challenges in the Safety-Security Co-Assurance of Collaborative Industrial Robots
Mario Gleirscher, Nikita Johnson, Panayiotis Karachristou, Radu Calinescu, James Law, John Clark
TL;DR
This chapter addresses the challenge of co-assuring safety and security in collaborative industrial robots (cobots) within manufacturing. It surveys general approaches to safety–security co-engineering, framed by the Safety-Security Assurance Framework (SSAF), and categorizes methods into structured risk analyses, architectural testing/monitoring, and formal assurance standards. Through an illustrative cobot case study, it ground-tests safety analyses (hazards, latent causes, and mitigation measures) and discusses how contemporary security concepts—threat modelling (e.g., STRIDE), policies, authentication, and IDS—apply to cobots, while highlighting gaps in cobot-specific security research. The work emphasizes socio-technical and technical challenges, such as ethics, policy design, continuous authentication, evidence management, and automated assurance, proposing a research roadmap to enable safer and more productive co-working of humans and cobots. The practical impact is a framework and set of challenges to guide researchers and practitioners toward integrated, certifiable, and adaptable safety–security co-assurance for industrial cobots.
Abstract
The coordinated assurance of interrelated critical properties, such as system safety and cyber-security, is one of the toughest challenges in critical systems engineering. In this chapter, we summarise approaches to the coordinated assurance of safety and security. Then, we highlight the state of the art and recent challenges in human-robot collaboration in manufacturing both from a safety and security perspective. We conclude with a list of procedural and technological issues to be tackled in the coordinated assurance of collaborative industrial robots.