IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2016 - 131

standards

How the IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society Is Dealing with Standards
By Tamas Haidegger and the IAB Standards Committee

tandardization has always been
an integral part of IEEE activities at large. Within the IEEE
Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Industrial Activities Board,
there is a Standing Committee for
Standards Activities (http://www.ieeeras.org/industry-government/standards). The first RAS standard was
released early last year (ontologies for
robotics and automation, IEEE 1872-
2015), followed by more, and, currently, there are three active subcommittees
working on novel packages.
Industrial Robot Ontology
(Craig Schlenoff, Chair, National
Institute of Standards and
Technology)
Previously, the Industrial Robot
Ontology group was working on the
assumption that the initial work
would focus on the canonical robot
command language (CRCL), which is
a robot-agnostic messaging language
initially developed at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology
and would then be expanded to the
more general domain of autonomous
kit building. This had the advantage
of developing a standard for robot
interoperability at a low level while
verifying that this protocol worked by
applying it to a simple but realistic
industrial domain.
At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
2016 (ICRA 2016), some group mem-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2016.2588159
Date of publication: 13 September 2016

bers in attendance brought up the kitting domain being of limited scope.
They feared that, although this
domain would be useful in proving
their concepts, it may not garner the
industrial support necessary for the
standard to be put into practice. Furthermore, it was not immediately
clear that the kitting ontology would
be easily extensible to other domains,
such as welding or full product
assembly. They also pointed out that
the CRCL could be thought of as an
instantiation of a low-level command
schema. They suggested that, due to
these limitations, the group refocus
their efforts on more cross-cutting
terms and structures and formulate
a standard that addresses the way
hierarchical planners can communicate between levels of a hierarchy.
This would include information such
as tasks, plans, actions, and skills
and would include preconditions
and effects of each action. In this
approach, the CRCL would become
an instance of the lowest-level command schema, and kitting would
become an application that could be
used to test the entire command/
plan framework.
This concept was proposed to the
group as a whole (including those
that were not able to attend the
ICRA 2016), and there was widespread support for this new approach.
The group will be writing the project
authorization request, due in September 2016, to become an official
IEEE standards group around this
concept of developing a standard

robotic hierarchical planning architecture.
Wearable Robotics (Thomas
Sugar, Chair, Arizona State
University)
The standing subcommittee met most
recently at the Wearable Robotics
Association Conference 16 (WearRAc 16) meeting in Phoenix, 10-12
February 2016. Five workshops were
held on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the
International Electrotechnical Commission, and IEEE standards for
wearable robotics, test methods for
wearable robotics, challenges in
interoperability of wearable robotics,
cybersecurity of wearable robotics,
and ergonomic issues for wearable
robotics. The members agreed to focus
on wearable robots for manufacturing
and industry
and not focus
on medical-re- Standardization has
lated devices.
Currently, there always been an
are no standards integral part of IEEE
for military exoskeletons, exo- activities at large.
skeletons for
construction,
and industrial exoskeletons. The development of standards for cybersecurity
is a truly open area.
Sugar is hosting some webinars on
test methods to determine the interest and focus (see the schedule at
http://www.ccefp.org/engagement/
industry/webinar/). Currently, the
group has talked about focusing on

September 2016

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

131

http://www.ieee http://www.ras.org/industry-government/stan http://www.ccefp.org/engagement/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2016