IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2020 - 9

STANDARDS

Status of IEEE RAS
Standardization Efforts
By Craig Schlenoff

T

he IEEE Robotics and Auto-
mation Society's (RAS's) Stan-
dards study and working
groups are strong and growing
stronger. As of the time of this month's
publication, we have two published
standards, six working groups actively
developing future standards, and one
study group about to transition to a
working group. More information
about these groups can be found at
https://www.ieee-ras.org/industry
-government/standards. This article
provides a brief overview of the
activities in each of these groups as
well as information for how to be-
come involved.
Robot Task Representation
Working Group
The Robot Task Representation Work-
ing Group (P1872.1) is developing a
standard that defines an ontology
allowing for the representation of, rea-
soning about, and communication of
task knowledge in the robotics and
automation domain. This ontology
includes key terms as well as their def-
initions, attributes, types, structures,
properties, constraints, and relation-
ships. It will address aspects of task
decomposition including concurrency
among tasks and hierarchical task
decomposition. This standard will
provide a way for planning systems to
represent task knowledge and allow
them to communicate with both plan-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2020.2986565
Date of current version: 10 June 2020

ning systems and humans. The work-
ing group is currently focused on
structuring knowledge frames that
partition the concepts and definitions
as well as the concepts and definitions
themselves. To become involved,
please contact Stephen Balakirsky at
stephen.balakirsky@gtri.gatech.edu.
Standards for the Autonomous
Robots Working Group
The Standards for the Autonomous
Robots Working Group (P1872.2) is
developing a standard that is a logical
extension to the existing Core Ontologies
for Robotics and Automation (CORA)
standard. This effort extends the CORA
ontology by defining additional ontolo-
gies appropriate for autonomous robots
(AuRs) related to
● the core design patterns specific to
AuRs in common robotics and auto-
mation subdomains
● the general ontological concepts and
domain-specific axioms for AuRs
● the general use cases and/or case
studies for AuRs.
The Working Group has defined the
vocabulary for AuRs and is currently
developing a case study to validate the
proposed concepts. Three milestones
have been identified for the implemen-
tation of two cooperating robots:
1) modeling the robots and devices in
the environment to represent the rela-
tions, instances, and functionalities,
2) modeling the goal of the robots and
the behaviors, and 3) including CORA
in the implementation. For more infor-
mation, please contact Howard Li at
howard@unb.ca.

3D Map Data Representation
Working Group
The 3D Map Data Representation
(3D-MDR) Working Group has the
goal of compiling a standard to allow
robots to exchange 3D maps in a com-
mon format,
which is differ-
ent from the We have two
private internal
representations published
robots use to standards, six
build, maintain,
and use their working groups
maps. The 3D- actively developing
MDR Working
Group has com- future standards,
pleted the defini- and one study
tion of the types
of 3D maps that group about to
will compose transition to a
the standard.
These include working group.
grid-based rep-
resentations, like
dense and sparse grids and octrees, and
non-grid-based representations, like
point clouds and polygonal meshes.
The 3D-MDR Working Group is cur-
rently working on the definition of data
formats in JSON that can be used to
represent the aforementioned types of
3D maps. To become involved, please
contact Francesco Amigoni at fran-
cesco.amigoni@polimi.it.
Verification of Autonomous
Systems-Guidelines
Working Group
The Verification of Autonomous Sys-
tems-Guidelines Working Group

JUNE 2020

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2020

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