Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Anderson
It's clear to me that "exposed laser" means that the laser light itself can escape the assembly in which it is generated. A "laser ring gyro" which uses a sealed optical path would be permitted (as long as it satisfied all other rules, of course).
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I agree with respect to ring laser gyros—in fact, those are specifically permitted per the 2011 rules.
The definition question depends on the conditions under which the laser is "exposed". Couldn't you argue that because the robot is designed to point the laser at the floor from within a shielded enclosure, that the combination of floor and robot serve to completely enclose the laser? Does the presence of an obvious failure mode (overturning the robot) negate this argument? (And what if the robot compensates for this by shuttering the laser as this failure is detected?) And given that <R02> is a safety rule, is exposure defined in terms of exposure to the surroundings in general, to humans, or to the laser-sensitive parts of humans (eyes, for ordinary lasers)? Furthermore, given that lasers are (almost completely) collimated, if the start and end points of a laser are not directly in any plausible line of sight (e.g. a laser beam across an opening in the robot), is that considered exposed? And what about reflected (i.e. substantially less collimated) light from a laser? Does that figure into exposure? Finally, there's the pedantic question of whether the rule is referring to a laser (the device), the aperture of a laser device, a beam of laser light, or some combination of those, when it talks about exposure.
It's not that your interpretation is unreasonable—quite the opposite. It's just that there are a number of other interpretations that might plausibly have been intended.