In mid-2001, Kuka Roboter, the third largest robot manufacturer in the world, shut down production of the world’s biggest robot. A 22-foot-tall six-axis appendage capable of hefting a 1,000-pound payload, the KR 500 was a solid machine with an almost unerring reliability record. It was designed for tasks such as placing thousands of engine blocks into thousands of trucks over several years at a stretch without fail. It broke new ground in safety features, from class four safety circuitry to triply redundant software monitoring. The KR 500 was made to be a factory fixture—repairmen were going to gather dust faster than it would.

Still, the German-based company went back to the drawing board to make the KR 500 even more reliable. Production was stopped so all the major casting nodes could be redesigned, reinforced and reengineered, new casting patterns made, and a whole new casting process developed. Needless to say, all this reworking was costly. Nothing was wrong with the KR 500, but Kuka had to prep it for amusement parks. The company wanted to develop a new ride, called the Robocoaster, based on their 2.6 ton heavy payload robot. In Kuka’s plan the big robotic arm was going to pick up two passengers at a time and shake them up, down, and every which way before gently placing them on the ground. Kuka wanted to break into the entertainment business, and the Robocoaster was going to turn thousands of parkgoers on their heads. All the company had to do was get through the most difficult safety certification process on the planet first.


A Robotic Ride

A successful ride has a way of tapping into the fundamental fears and base thrills that everyone possesses. It can be anything from falling from a towering height to shooting headlong through darkness—as long as it manages to get every passenger’s heart racing, the ride will be a success. Robocoaster works its magic by tapping into the childhood delight of being scooped up and flung around by your favorite uncle. You can think of the Robocoaster as your uncle’s giant arm picking you up by the ankles and flinging you through the air. The ride can toss you end over end, spin you round and round, and throw you straight up and drop you right back down—in any order and intensity that the operator chooses.

Gino De-Gol, Kuka’s managing director and Robocoaster’s inventor, has a hard time hiding the pride he has in his creation. He knows that he’s developed a ride that delivers a lot of bang for the buck. “Robocoaster can simulate a lot of other rides—it has ride dynamics, movements, and sensations that you can get from different rides like a coaster or an LIM launching system, or an ejector seat sort of ride. What’s different about Robocoaster is that it can put them together in different combinations and in a flexible format that can be updated and changed.”

For De-Gol the thing that makes Robocoaster special is how it can accomplish the feats of other rides, but in a smaller package and at a much lower cost. Sporting a small footprint and a price tag of $300,000, Robocoasters can find homes in FECs just as easily as they can in major theme parks. And they bring a great deal of programmability wherever they go. “The standard FEC systems have five rides: gentle, fast, fun, turbo, and extreme. Extreme is the most that we’re allowed to do to an individual and gentle is almost a relaxing experience,” says De-Gol. Robocoaster pulls all of this off without requiring the intensive hydraulic hardware of other thrill rides offering similar experiences. Parks can even put a bunch of Robocoasters in a line and program them for some pretty fancy synchronized movements. A line of Robocoasters can handle as much traffic as a major thrill ride and deliver an experience to match.



Machine Works

According to De-Gol, there’s really nothing tricky up the Robocoaster’s sleeve, “It’s an industrial robot with seats on the end and an extraordinary number of active and passive safety measures embedded into the system.” It wasn’t a flash of inspired genius that gave birth to the innovative ride but years and years of industrial evolution. Kuka has been in the robot business since the dawn of industrial robots way back in the late ’70’s. De-Gol worked as one of the principle engineers putting together entire body shop systems that incorporated hundreds and sometimes thousands of robots for Ford and GM. Back in the early days robots were built big and clunky so they wouldn’t break. But robotic performance, almost in parallel to computer performance, increased exponentially while production costs kept falling.

“About five years ago we reached a technology milestone where robot payloads and performance could realistically support passenger-carrying apparatus. At the same time software safety technology was making quantum leaps in terms of empirical redundancy—aircraft like the Airbus, for example, can now be flown by software systems and, provided they’re triply redundant, there’s an acceptable level of safety technology,” De-Gol says. Everything came together about three or four years ago to a crunch point when I realized I was absolutely confident we could get realistic passenger-carrying safety certification and I was going to go for it.”

So when Kuka developed the KR 500 they intended it to be capable of carrying passengers right from the start. “We went right to work developing a passenger-carrying amusement ride based on robotics. Serious robotics, not what the Japanese companies do—put a few things together and call it a robot—I mean a real, fluid, six-axis, articulated robot,” De-Gol says.

As soon as the KR 500 was ready, the company put a couple of crash test dummies into a seat and mounted it to the robot. This Robocoaster concept ride made its debut at IAAPA’s 2001 Trade Show, where it received an extremely positive reaction from the industry. From there, Kuka developed and certified a prototype for passenger carrying and brought it to a few more shows. This finally culminated in enthusiastic volunteers crowding around the Kuka booth at Interschau 2002 in Düsseldorf, eager to test the ride dynamics of the prototype Robocoaster. After that, the ride got the green light to be developed.

A TUV Story

This is about the time Kuka came face to face with a major challenge—how to build a ride that would meet safety standards that vary from country to country. They looked at all of the worldwide safety certification standards at that time and how they would apply to the Robocoaster. The markets for their ride existed in three major regions: Asia and Pacific Rim, the continental U.S., and Europe. De-Gol saw very different standards with disparate elements—some good, some bad—within each region. The principle in Asia is the Japanese Industry Standards (JIS) of which there are a lot of hinging standards for amusement apparatus.

The ASTM standards in the U.S. were going through a difficult reevaluation leading toward the ASTM F-24 standards, about which there was a lot of debate and unclear definitions. In Europe, the toughest in the world at the time, was the German standard—(DIN) as administered by the TUV (Technischer Ueberwachungsverein).

Within the TUV testing empire there are only three TUV elements that are qualified for ride certification, and the hardest of the hard, the toughest of the TUV as they joke in Germany, is TUV Munich. “They have a very, very strict and ruthless implementation of safety regimes,” De-Gol says. “There are very few companies outside military and aerospace and certainly none in entertainment that could qualify for TUV Munich certification.”

In Germany the TUV is like a semi-privatized government organization that does all the car and elevator testing, as well as testing for products as varied as the passenger-carrying apparatus in hotels and airports to nuclear power plants.


The TUV is a huge organization. Across Germany there are hundreds of TUV stations and elements, and there are even more around the globe. Many international companies turn to the organization to ensure that their products enter the worldwide safety and certification pipeline without any initial problems. The way Kuka saw it, if the company was going to roll out the Robocoaster to the key players all over the world, especially the U.S., then TUV Munich was the gold standard they needed to hit.

For De-Gol, there were more than a few times when he wondered if it was really worth going through the TUV, because it resulted in such a long developmental curve and cost so much money. The process was made even more difficult when TUV Munich insisted on upping the Robocoaster’s fatigue cycle from no mechanical failures per 10 years to no failures per 100 years. “To say that it was a difficult safety certification would be an understatement, even for the TUV. If an Airbus were to have this safety criterion it would need a giant spring hanging off the aircraft and the hand of God as a backup system.”

Is TUV Enough?

But that was only the beginning. TUV Munich insisted on starting the certification process from scratch, throwing out the materials testing, manufacturing, and assembly standards that Kuka had already established for the manufacture of all of its industrial robots. “We told them that we had some very high-tech alloys, very complex analysis platforms for showing the stress in the finite element methods, in the failure modes and effect analyses. These came more from the aircraft industry than the amusement industry. The TUV said, ‘Let’s make one thing perfectly clear; we are not going to have any transposition of known materials and their performance. For the accreditation of amusement park rides we’re going to start with a clean sheet.’ That’s when everybody’s heart sank,” De-Gol recalls.

The process of getting the materials approved, the assembly standards qualified, and the manufacturing standards thoroughly examined was excruciatingly slow. Everything was put under a microscope by the TUV, including the foundry and the equipment that produced it. But Kuka was determined to get the Robocoaster through TUV Munich and ready for prime time.

The company had to restructure everything and design backwards to make both the Robocoaster and the KR 500 entirely mechanically and passively redundant. “That was why we had to stop production. Instead of working on a safety factor of 1.3 we had to work on a safety index of two,” De-Gol says. “This was a system that was in production that we had to stop. I had some very painful red carpet meetings with [Kuka’s] main board to explain why we were stopping production and changing things and holding inventory, and why they were signing off some very big acquisition orders of new design processes. That was an incredible step to take and one that I thought Kuka wouldn’t be prepared to take, but they did, God bless them.”

Earning the Rubber Stamp

Even after Robocoaster earned its DIN 4112 certification, the unified standard for the design and manufacture of amusement rides, it didn’t guarantee automatic acceptance of the standard in the U.S., Japan, or even France, for that matter. But the certification and engineering data generated by the rigorous tests at TUV Munich has been somewhat easily transposed to other markets. When it comes time to meet an industry standard such as the JIS, for instance, the Japanese should just look at the certification process and find more than enough information to earn a rubber stamp. In that respect, the reams of rigorous test data and incredibly strict standards imposed by TUV Munich have paid off. According to De-Gol, the large European and U.S. entertainment groups that Kuka has been working with know TUV Munich pretty well and feel very comfortable with their testing. Immediately after debuting the Robocoaster at IAAPA 2002, Kuka sold 10 of the rides to Legoland Denmark.


De-Gol is a little hesitant to give his thumbs up to the whole experience, however. “In hindsight, if you asked me before if it was worth it, from my personal viewpoint I would say that it was almost too painful and perhaps a little unnecessary. But I’m starting to change my opinion on that because it has made the launch much easier. I’m still not completely there, though. I think by the end of the launch I’ll think that it was well worth it, but it was a big gamble to take. A lot of [amusement park] equipment wouldn’t pass [TUV Munich’s] criteria because they are so tough. Some in the industry, particularly in the U.S., are resisting promulgation around the TUV standards because of the consequences to the industry. There are some great things [from TUV] that we would like to see implemented, but we wouldn’t like to see the broad-brush standard applied across the industry because it would kill off so many of the ride applications that people consider to be extremely safe anyway.”