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2016
Book Article
Titel
Standardisation and safety in Service Robotics
Abstract
Standardisation is an important factor to pave the way onto the market for new and innovative robotic products and to foster market growth. While safety standards form the basis to establish a robotic product on the market, other standards can help to dismantle trade barriers. Standards on terminology and coordinate systems as well as ontologies improve communication between manufacturers, suppliers and end users and are first steps 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. As the market for service robots constantly grows, the demand for standards in this area also constantly rises. 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. As an effect, several new standardisation working groups have formed in ISO, but also in other standardisation organisations. The working groups are open to all interested stakeholders from industry, academia and general society including manufacturers, integrators and professional end users. 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.