Work zone

A volume with a rule attached: the robot must stay inside it, or must stay out of it.

What it protects

Work zones express the limits of a cell that are not physical objects — the reach you are willing to give the robot, the corridor a person walks through, the space above a conveyor.

Not a safety function

A work zone is checked by the software when it plans. It is not a safety device and it does not replace the robot controller's own zone monitoring. See Safety.

Defining one

Give it a size and a position, and say which side of it the robot belongs on. Like every other object it can hang off a reference, which is how a zone follows the station it belongs to.

What happens at the border

A trajectory that would breach the zone is not produced: the software reports it instead of planning around the rule. That is deliberate — a zone quietly ignored is worse than no zone.