Standards Committee - Industrial Activities Board

Raj Madhavan

Vice-President – Industrial Activities

Institute for Systems Research, UMD-CP & Intelligent Systems Division, NIST
Clarksburg (MD), United States
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IEEE-RAS Standards Committee Meeting @ IROS'12
Monday - 8 October 2012 - 9:00 – 17:00

The Standing Committee for Standards Activities (SCSA) under the Industrial Activities Board (IAB) of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) has been actively working with the research and industrial communities and other Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs). The standardization efforts are now formally being pursued under two Working Groups (WGs) with RAS as the official sponsor. As it has been customary the last two years, we will have a full-day meeting dedicated to discussing the work of the WGs at IROS'12. The WGs welcome your comment sand participation in this standardization process. To be involved in the activities of the standards committee, neither RAS nor IEEE-SA memberships are mandatory. An overview of the work carried out by the WGs and an agenda for the meeting are below.

We hope to see you in Vilamoura!

Raj Madhavan, Ph.D.
Chair, Standing Committee for Standards Activities & Vice President,
Industrial Activities Board IEEE Robotics and Automation Society

*0900-1230 IEEE-RAS Ontologies for Robotics and Automation Working Group (ORA WG)*
Chairs: Craig Schlenoff, NIST and Edson Prestes, UFRGS

The goal of the IEEE-RAS Ontologies for Robotics and Automation Working Group is to develop a standard ontology and associated methodology for knowledge representation and reasoning in robotics and automation, together with the representation of concepts in an initial set of application domains. The standard will provide a unified way of representing knowledge and will provide a common set of terms and definitions, allowing for unambiguous knowledge transfer among any group of humans, robots, and other artificial systems. To date, the working group has over 130 members containing a cross-section of industry, academia, and government, representing over twenty countries.

It would be extremely difficult to develop an ontology that could cover the entire space of robotics and automation. Hence, the working group is structured in such a way as to take a bottom-up and top-down approach to addressing this broad domain. This group is comprised of four sub-groups entitled: Upper Ontology/Methodology(UpOM), Autonomous Robots (AuR), Service Robots (SeR), and Industrial Robots (InR). The InR, AuR, and SeR sub-groups are producing sub-domain ontologies that will serve as a test case to validate the upper ontology and the methodology developed by UpOM. Once initial versions of the ontologies are completed, they will be integrated into the overall ontology.

Notable recent accomplishments within the ORA group are as follows:

*Special session at IROS "Knowledge Representation and Ontologies for Robotics and Automation

*Book chapter to be published in: Bridges between the Methodological and Practical Work of the Robotics and Cognitive Systems Communities – From Sensors to Concepts Book, Y. Amirat and A. Chibani, (Eds.), Intelligent Systems Reference Library, Springer-Verlag, 2012.

*Workshop at UBICOMP'12 (Pittsburgh, PA) entitled "Smart Gadgets Meet Ubiquitous and Social Robots on the Web" (Sept. 8, 2012)

*Initial modeling of concepts in (ISO 8373 - Robots and Robotic Devices – Vocabulary) within our ontology: In this meeting, we will hear updates on progress on modeling the ISO 8373 concepts in the ontology, hear an update on the progress of the industrial robots group, discuss the working group procedures, determine an outline for the standard, and decide next steps.

AGENDA (8 October 2012: 09:00-12:30)

09:00-09:15 ORA Overview and Status, Craig Schlenoff
09:15-09:35 Update on ORA Ontology, Dr. Edson Prestes
09:35-10:00 Semantic reasoning using standard ORA ontologies for service robots: challenges and current progress, Dr. Abdelghani Chibani
10:00-10:20 Title TBD, Dr. Maki Habib
10:20-10:40 Update on the Industrial Robot Ontology, Dr. Stephen Balakirsky
10:40-11:00 Break
11:00-11:15 Implementation of a Robot Knowledge Systems, Dr. Antti Tikanmaki
11:15-11:30 Robots for medicine, medicine for robots – the need for standards and ontologies, Dr. Tamas Haidegger
11:30-12:30 Discussion, All LUNCH
12:30-13:30

*13:30-17:00 IEEE-RAS Robot Map Data Representation for Navigation Working Group (MDR WG)* Chairs: Wonpil Yu, ETRI and Geoff Biggs, AIST

*What is the MDR standard?
The MDR standard aims to standardize a common representation and encoding for the two-dimensional map data used for navigation by mobile robots. The encoding will be used when exchanging map data with other components and systems. The standard focuses on interchange of map data between components and systems, particularly those that may be supplied by different vendors. As well as the encoding, the standard aims to specify suitable APIs and protocols for the interchange process so that navigation-related components from multiple vendors may inter-operate.

*What does the MDR standard not do?
It does not aim to standardize the format of map data used internally in systems, such as for performing navigation calculations, obstacle avoidance, or for storage in a database. It also does not place any constraints Vendors supplying robot components relevant to navigation who choose to conform to the standard may use any encoding they choose for internal representation, provided the map data is available in the standard encoding when accessed through the standard APIs. The standard additionally places no constraints on where map data comes from or how it is constructed. A vendor's component is free to construct map data online or load it from a database of maps constructed a priori as it sees fit.

*What does the standard target?
The MDR standard is aimed at mobile robots capable of movement in two dimensions operating in both indoor and outdoor environments. No restrictions are placed on the complexity of the environment. Applications include, but are not limited to, autonomous road navigation, factory logistics systems, defense and rescue robots, and household service robots.

*What sorts of maps will be supported?
Most importantly, the standard only considers static maps. Maps with dynamic information will not be explicitly supported. Metric maps, topological maps, and combined metric/topological maps will all be supported equally by the standard. Additionally, no limit is placed on geographical scale or sensor modalities.

*Why does the standard matter?
Autonomous robots, operating without guide tracks in uncontrolled environments are becoming increasingly common and economically viable. One of the most basic requirements for robot navigation is some form of map. Complying with a standard for map data representation makes a vendor's components more compatible with others and therefore makes their products more desirable and more likely to win contracts. Standards compliance is particularly important in environments with devices from diverse vendors inter-operating, such as factories and military environments, where data interchange is a common occurrence. Being able to both use and provide the common data being shared amongst such devices is essential.

*Recent activities of MDR WG
- IEEE CASE workshop on "Industry Practices on Map Data Representation for Robot Navigation" on Aug. 20, Seoul, Korea
- MDR (Map Data Representation) standard document draft v0.1: Ten experts volunteered as an author for writing and reviewing the MDR draft so far (2 from Japan, 3 from Korea, 5 from EU)

AGENDA (8 October 2012: 13:30-17:00)

1. Welcome and Introductions (15 min)
2. Agree on agenda and add any other business (5 min)
3. Review and approval of minutes from the previous meeting (15 min)
4. WG Update and Reports (15 min)
5. Discussion items

a. MDR draft - overview (sec.1) – 20 min (Wonpil Yu)
b. MDR draft – Normative references (sec. 2) - TBA
c. MDR draft - Definitions (sec. 3) - TBA
d. MDR draft - abbreviation and acronyms (sec.4) - TBA
e. MDR draft - general description (sec. 5) – 20 min (David Alejandro Trejo Pizzo)
f. MDR draft – metric map (sec. 6.1) – 20 min (Francesco Amigoni and Matteo Matteucci)
g. MDR draft – topology map (sec. 6.2) - TBA
h. MDR draft – hybrid map (sec. 6.3) - TBA
i. MDR draft – exchange interface (sec. 7) - TBA
j. MDR draft – API (sec. 8) – 20 min (David Alejandro Trejo Pizzo)
k. MDR draft - Use case reports (sec. 9) – 20 min (Tsuyoshi Tasaki)
l. MDR draft – relation to other SDOs (sec. 10) – 20 min (Wonpil Yu and Hyungpil Moon)

6. Next meeting (10 min)
7. Adjourn