The Machinery Directive (Directive 2006/42/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council relating to machinery and amending Directive 95/16/EC) is an instrument aimed at ensuring the safety of persons during the use, transport or even machine handling. Its scope is particularly wide and its approach to risks is intended to be exhaustive. In other words, all the risks resulting from the use of machines were taken into consideration when drafting it. In addition, the approach to risk is pragmatic there since the Machinery Directive does not prohibit risk and thus contemplates the possibility of the existence of residual risks.
Its requirements apply as much to industrial robotics as to domestic robotics. This can be seen in the recitals set out in the introduction to the Machinery Directive: “It is the responsibility of the Member States to ensure, on their territory, the health and safety of persons, in particular workers and consumers and, where appropriate, domestic animals and goods, in particular vis-à-vis the risks arising from the use of machinery.
It is also a so-called “new approach” directive. Thus, it is limited to essential safety requirements and does not deal with dispensing with considerations of a technical nature. The said technical considerations are left to the standardization bodies which will have to produce the harmonized standards, of voluntary application, making it possible to comply with the essential safety requirements. These “new approach” instruments respond to a problem raised during the application of older directives, the particularly technical requirements of which invariably led to an obsolescence of the required technique.
The first version of the Machinery Directive dates back to 1989 (Directive 89/392/EEC), comes into force on 1is January 1993 and had its first amendments in 1991. The Machinery Directive was last updated in 2006. Being a directive, its requirements had to be transposed into French law, and more specifically, into the Labor Code. This transposition phase should disappear in the probable event that the plan to transform the Machinery Directive into a regulation were to be maintained.
The machine is defined therein in its article 2a): “assembly equipped or intended to be equipped with a drive system other than human or animal force applied directly, composed of parts or organs linked together of which at least one is mobile and which are joined together for a specific application”.
Thus, the force driving the system and allowing the mobility of the machine cannot be human or animal. It can be, for example, hydraulic or electric. The requirement for a defined application is also noteworthy. Indeed, because of this condition, a cobot, or collaborative application robot, without a defined application, cannot be considered as a machine.
The Machinery Directive therefore deals with responding to the following problem: How to integrate safety into the design of machines?
Its operation may seem relatively complex (section 1), but the designer has real autonomy in the technical choices and, to a certain extent, in the certification procedures. The documentation required by the Machinery Directive (section 2) makes it possible to demonstrate compliance with the requirements in terms of machine safety (section 3). The reforms proposed in this area are unconvincing and, as they stand, will result in more complex legal matters for the builder (section 4).