Standardisation and safety in service robotics

As the market for service robots constantly grows, the demand for standards in this area rises. To bring robotic products on the market, manufacturers have to fulfill safety regulations. Safety standards help in this case to make requirements transparent and to provide best-practice examples for safe design, eventually reducing the legal risk for manufacturers. While safety standards form the basis to establish a robotic product on the market, other standards can help to dismantle trade barriers and to foster market growth. Standards on terminology and coordinate systems as well as ontologies improve communication between manufacturers, suppliers and end users and are a first step towards exchangeable robot components. In a few years more standards on robot modularity can be expected that will help making robot systems modular and highly interchangeable. Further initiatives have started to create standards for benchmarking robot performance, making complex robot abilities measurable with the goal to increase market transparency. Due to the large variety of service robot designs and application domains, existing and newly developed standards usually do not cover all service robots but are limited to certain environments and robot types. Different standardisation organisations have adopted different approaches to fill the existing gaps. This article gives an overview on current standardisation activities, especially with the aspect of safety, and points out possibilities to get involved in standard development.