Brave New World? Processing of personal data about employees under Art. 9 of GDPR in the context of human-robot interaction

Ensuring safe and secure collaboration between robots and human workers is essential for the successful deployment of artificial intelligence on the factory shop floor. Any such interaction depends on actions such as perception, sensing and action on the part of the robot which are, essentially, enabled by the realtime processing of personal data concerning the factory workers. The majority of these data would easily fall into the special category of personal data under article 9 GDPR, e.g. as biometric data. This means that their processing would in principle be prohibited unless allowed by one of the explicit exceptions. In this paper, we analyse which of these grounds may be applicable, taking into account the specifics of these interactions on the shop floor, that is, in an employment context with high level of safety risks. We explore the problem focusing on selected scenarios which are inspired from real or planned deployments of human-robot collaborative manufacturing technologies in the industries of aerospace, maritime and automotive manufacturing.