Christopher Woller joined Beckhoff USA as safety product manager in January 2022. He brought considerable experience as a skilled market builder and consultant with a passion for digital transformation. Most recently, Woller spent six years at Siemens, starting as an automation consultant and ending as business development manager—building automation products. Prior to Siemens, he worked as an application engineer for a high-tech distributor and an assistant technical director at a stagecraft and entertainment engineering company, among other roles. Woller’s diverse application experience and strong background in functional safety made him an excellent addition to the Beckhoff team.
Christopher Woller, safety product manager, Beckhoff USA: The worlds of safety and non-safety automation continue to converge at an exponential rate (Figure 1). Just five years ago, we were still discussing the merits of a programable safety controller paired with a safe fieldbus versus safety relays providing rudimentary status information back to the control system. Now, we’re exploring the possibilities of distributed logic with components seamlessly entering and leaving safety systems as emerging technologies like automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) more closely interact with the control systems and machinery around them. Ultimately, this has also driven sensors to become smarter. The safety fieldbus was once only the domain of high-end laser scanners and the like, but now even lower-level sensors and door locks are starting to leverage a fully integrated, networked safety approach.
What’s the most innovative or efficient safety application you’ve ever seen or been involved with?
Christopher Woller, safety product manager, Beckhoff USA: The most innovative safety application I’ve been involved with was for a massive television-studio complex in the Philippines. Each studio held between approximately nine and 50 movable grids that were 4-by-4-meter squares. When fully loaded, they could weigh up to 3,500 lbs. These overhead grids held lighting, sound equipment and scenery, and each one was held by one or two vertical hoists. There were well over 100 of these grids.
To control them, we used safety-rated wireless HMIs. While an operator moved between studios or to different areas inside a larger studio, their location would be tracked via safety-rated RFID. E-stop scope of control and the ability to move grids was entirely based on the operator’s location within the facility. In this case, any control HMI could be used in any location and still provide the appropriate safety functions for that location.
Christopher Woller, safety product manager, Beckhoff USA: The importance of diagnostics and visibility cannot be overstated. The fastest way to get a safety system bypassed is to make it hard to diagnose. Connectivity and remote monitoring make it possible to get the right information to the right person as quickly as possible, even if that person is hundreds or thousands of miles away. Gone are the days of a single output wire to the PLC indicating a fault.
How does safety figure into any digital-twin platform being used by manufacturers?
Christopher Woller, safety product manager, Beckhoff USA: Quite simply, by definition, without safety you cannot have a digital twin. Since safety must exist in the real world, a digital twin must consider it, as well. The digital twin is not just a debugger of the PLC, a mechanical or hydraulic force calculator or a mechatronics path simulation. It takes all aspects—a true running controller, safety controller and sensors, machine physics, motion paths—and effectively allows a much faster path to commissioning. An exceptional digital twin lives beyond the commissioning phase as a sandbox that the end user can incorporate with other digital twins to continually optimize the process in a virtual environment.
When will safety components and initiatives become IT-friendly enough that engineers and safety professionals are no longer required for installation and operation?
Christopher Woller, safety product manager, Beckhoff USA: While individual safety functions are conceivably standardized enough that anyone can drop them in place, the fact remains that the iterative process of “risk assessment-identification-reduction-validation” still requires operators, and, if required for the process, engineers and safety professionals with knowledge of the application. And the process needs to happen regularly throughout the life of the machine or system. These will still be very viable careers for many years to come.
What future innovations will impact safety in discrete-manufacturing operations?
Christopher Woller, safety product manager, Beckhoff USA: My opinion is that wearables and vision will start to play a major role in functional safety. As vision and artificial-intelligence (AI) technology advances and becomes robust enough to pass muster with safety standards, I see it replacing many sensors, reducing failure points and making architectures even more flexible. I also think safety-rated wearables will become increasingly important as AGVs and AMRs proliferate through even more industries.
Christopher Woller, safety product manager, Beckhoff USA: TwinSAFE integrates standard automation and machine safety on one platform. Beckhoff offers simple implementation of all required safety functions through direct integration into the Beckhoff control system. By incorporating safety logic functionality into all new TwinSAFE input and output components, such as the EL1918 modules from Beckhoff, we offer architectural flexibility and scalability that is unmatched. Modular concepts in complex networks can be implemented more easily than ever before. While many networks can be used, users maximize the performance of TwinSAFE when it is networked via the EtherCAT industrial Ethernet system using Functional Safety over EtherCAT (FSoE). This offers a host of advantages, including high performance, flexible topology selection and built-in diagnostics (Figure 2).
