Safety Laser Scanner / Safety Light Curtain

Certified safety devices that detect a person entering a danger zone and stop the machine before contact.

Both devices fall under electro-sensitive protective equipment (ESPE): industrial safety sensors that make a machine “stop when it sees a person,” certified to standards such as IEC 61496, whose output is a safety-rated stop signal rather than ordinary data meant for an algorithm to interpret. A safety light curtain consists of a pair of emitter and receiver columns; the emitter sends a row of parallel infrared beams to the receiver, and blocking any single beam triggers a stop, commonly installed at the entrance to a machine tool or robot work cell. A safety laser scanner is a certified 2D laser scanning device that can define a “warning zone” and a “protective zone” within its scan plane: entering the warning zone slows the machine or triggers an alarm, and entering the protective zone stops it. Both let robots avoid needing a full physical fence, and are common hardware for AMR collision avoidance and speed-and-separation monitoring in human-robot collaboration.

ExampleA pair of safety light curtains guards the entrance to a robot arm’s loading station; when a worker reaches in to grab material, the beam is blocked and the arm immediately performs a protective stop.

Also called

Safety Laser Scanner, Safety Light Curtain, Electro-Sensitive Protective Equipment (ESPE)

Related

Functional Safety · Speed and Separation Monitoring · Protective Stop · 2D LiDAR · Autonomous Mobile Robot · ISO 10218-1/-2:2025 Robotics — Safety Requirements

Sources

Light curtain - Wikipedia
SICK Safety laser scanners