IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2010 - 19

Internet offers a mammoth market for the service providers,
device manufactures, and application developers. Key for tapping this market is agreed communication protocols. Without
such common protocols, vendors and service providers would
likely offer their proprietary, often incompatible solutions. The
customers would be urged to lock into such proprietary solutions and likely show much more reluctance in buying the
products. The market as a whole would develop much slower
without standardized communication protocols and so would
the revenues of the companies. With standardized protocols, consumers do not have to lock into some vendor-specific solutions
and can probably choose among a much larger product variety at
a lower cost level. In any case, all stakeholders have an economic
benefit that can be quantified as a monetary value.
That still leaves us with the questions of why an academic
society should promote standards, what those standards should
be, and what the return on investment could be.
Many researchers might possibly say: "I want to do good
research. I do not see any benefit in wasting my time and burning my travel budget by attending standard defining meetings."
While research is synonymous for search for novelty and
unrestricted scientific and technological progress, standardization is often equated with scientific standstill. This equation is fundamentally wrong, as much as is the idea to create
standards just l'art pour l'art or to account for some thirdparty's interest.
It is puzzling, e.g., that after 50 years of research and development, the robotics research community has not agreed on a
standard for the description of coordinate systems or measures
for distances and angles; there is no glossary of communitywide agreed upon, well-defined terms. Of several dozen algorithms in the field of mobile manipulation and three-dimensional perception and modeling, which have been investigated
for commonalities in data structures and interfaces, almost all
of them use proprietary formats. This situation has nothing to
do with the freedom of research. As a matter of fact, it hampers
and decelerates research rather than accelerating and supporting
it. Apparently, the robotics research community has a bad need
for standards.
Standards, however, do not always have to be traditional
standards approved by formalized committees in long series of
meetings and discussions driven by commercial interests.
There can also be de facto standards, often established by
powerful players, in particular, when the less powerful players
adhere to diverse concepts and approaches. Such de facto
standards create a well-defined basis for technology development but do not always satisfy the needs of a large community
of stakeholders.
There can be open standards, which are publicly available
and free of royalties and where the term "open" refers to the
developed specification as well as "the openness of the drafting
process, and the ownership of rights in the standard" (see en.

SEPTEMBER 2010

wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard). Finally, there may be
standards that have emerged without a formal consensus process
but have been accepted and adopted by the community as bestpractice solutions.
Having agreed on what is best practice is a good starting
point for establishing useful formal standards but, in fact, can
also make formal standards dispensable. The problem with the
best-practice solutions is that they are often inseparable from
their implementations and the context within which they
have been developed. Very often, they cannot be reused in
contexts and environments other than the ones they were developed for or in.
To separate the best-practice algorithms and software artifacts from technical details of their implementations and to
make them comparable and reusable outside of their native
operational context is one of the major objective of the European research project BRICS-best practice in robotics (www.
best-of-robotics.org). BRICS' prime objective is to structure
and formalize the robot development process for advanced
robotics and provide tools, models, and functional libraries, which
help to significantly accelerate this process. In more detail,
BRICS intends to
u survey and analyze completed robot developments with
respect to their deficiencies in terms of tool support,
reuse of components, use of harmonized interfaces, and
use of functional and model libraries
u promote and moderate a community-wide discussion
on the identification, evaluation, and refactoring of best
practice in robotics algorithms and software systems
u design and implement an integrated development environment for robotics (called "BRIDE") and an accompanying software repository of best-practice robotics
algorithms (called "BROCRE")
u significantly promote the interoperability of hardware
and software components by harmonizing the interfaces
and the communication between these components
u define and implement showcases, which allow to measure
and evaluate the progress between today's practices and
the BRICS-enabled robot development process.
The consortium has four years time to achieve these objectives. It is about to kick-start an open and constructive discussion with the robotics community about the most mature data
types and application programming interfaces (APIs) in
robotics, namely those dealing with the geometric and kinematic aspects of robots such as six-dimensional (6-D) positions
and velocities or kinematic transformations.
The success of the project will very much depend on the
consortium's ability to involve the robotics community at
large in its attempt to consolidate best practice in robotics and
to make it reusable. If successful, however, this will certainly
be not only a long but also a good way to establishing useful
standards in robotics research.

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard http://www.best-of-robotics.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2010