IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2018 - 102

INDUSTRY Activities

Robotics Will Dominate:
Introducing the New Industrial
Activities Board
By Dominik Bösl

R

"

obotics will change the world!
It will unleash the same, if not
an even greater, disruptive and
transformational power within
the next 50 years as did mainstream
information technology and the Inter-
net over the last half a century. As it-
slowly but gradually-permeates all
areas of the living realm, our grandchildren
will grow up as the first Generation R
of robotic natives."
For some time now, I have been
writing these lines often and in different
forms-I try to sneak them into my
papers, presentations, panels, and inter-
views. I would even put them in fortune
cookies, if I could. Why? Because I am
absolutely convinced this will happen.
Robotics and automation, especially
in combination with artificial intelligence
(AI), will be two of the most disruptive
fields of technology that humankind has
fostered. Leaving aside debates over
whether robotics might be simply an
embodied form of AI (as some of you
like to say) or which one is driving the
other, both domains are progressing at
an ever-increasing rate. You, the mem-
bers of the IEEE Robotics and Automa-
tion Society (RAS), are pushing the
envelope of research and development
every day.
Unfortunately, science and research
alone are only the half the matter. For
an invention to become an innovation,
you also have to master the transfer gap,
bring it into development, transform it
into a product, and be successful in the

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2018.2875291
Date of publication: 12 December 2018

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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market. My predecessor as vice presi-
dent for Industrial Activities, Erwin
Prassler, put it in a nutshell in his inau-
gural IEEE Robotics and Automation
Magazine (RAM) article "Robotics Aca-
demia and Industry: We Need to Talk!"
As a person working in the robotics
industry, I can assure you-we still have
to talk a lot!
In my different roles with the IEEE,
KUKA, TUM, and the Robotic and AI
Governance initiative, I can personally
relate to this struggle and sometimes feel
like a traveler between the worlds of aca-
demia and industry. The discussion
affects even so seemingly simple issues as
the (sometimes a bit ineffable) question,
"What is a robot?" In an era of robot
hype and on the cusp of an AI frenzy, the
notion of a robot has already been
watered down. Some see in it the afore-
mentioned embodiment of AI, and oth-
ers think of chatbots and AI assistants,
whereas, for the robotics community, it
mostly requires at least a physical form
for something to be called a robot.
The mission of the RAS Industrial
Activities Board (IAB) is to act as a liai-
son to industry in the robotics and auto-
mation domain; this includes robot
manufacturers as much as it does com-
panies applying robotics and automation
technologies somewhere in their product
lifecycle. We aim to act as facilitators and
translators to foster discourse between
those two domains that ultimately seek
the same result but sometimes seem to
speak different languages. To increase the
added value, both sides-academia and
industry-can benefit from a mutual
exchange and partnership.

december 2018

One field of action that is deeply
rooted in the mission of the IAB and
even the RAS bylaws is to analyze and
harmonize the standardization land-
scape in the field of robotics and auto-
mation. The RAS Standing Committee
for Standards Activities is currently
chaired by RAS IAB Associate Vice
President Craig Schlenoff. Craig is with
the U.S. National Institute of Standards
and Technology and brings a lot of
experience in standardization into his
role. One of his first efforts, besides
compiling a map of the current land-
scape of robotic standards, was to orga-
nize a Standardization Harmonization
Workshop at the IEEE/RSJ Internation-
al Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS) 2018 in Madrid, Spain
(Figure 1). Representatives from IEEE-
South America, the International Stan-
dards Organization, the International
Electrotechnical Commission, the
American Society of Mechanical Engi-
neering, and Robotic Industries Associ-
ation met to discuss robotic and
automation standards. To underline the
importance of harmonization, they
agreed to set up two annual workshops
to align their standardization strategies.
A summary of the first workshop,
including a call for participation, will
be published in the March 2019 issue
of RAM.
Providing a way for industry to sub-
mit publications to the IROS and the
flagship International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA) has
been challenging. Starting with ICRA
2019 in Montreal, the IAB, in close
collaboration with the Conference
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