Date: 1 November, 2024
Mobile robots deployed in public places that are shared with human bystanders require an additional layer of standards beyond that needed for robots employed among workers at sites such as factories or warehouses. Compared to worksite employees engaged with robots, bystanders in public spaces are generally uninvolved, untrained, unprotected, and inattentive with respect to public-area mobile robots (PMRs). Furthermore, such public-area bystanders may be blind, deaf, wheelchair users, elderly or children.
Deploying mobile robots among humans unrelated to the robots’ tasks or purposes on sidewalks or within buildings is a recent innovation. Since they are currently deployed in very small numbers and with cautious, remote oversight and teleoperation, we have not yet experienced the impact of PMRs at scale. But how will our cities and communities function when there are large, multi-agent PMR fleets assigned a variety of tasks and on independent schedules converging in one place and time? How can you prepare?
Standardization is fundamental to nearly everything we make, use, and consume. Critical to quality, efficiency, and safety, standardization helps to build customer trust, foster innovation, structure methods, ensure compliance with regulations and legislation, guide procedures, enable repeatable results, and create growing flows of consistent data which lead to improved analytics.
During daily mobility activities, standardization helps us to know what to expect as we walk, use doors, stairs, corridors, elevators, and share sidewalks, hallways, and crosswalks. Some of these shared spaces can easily become hazardous. Consider icy sidewalks, poorly maintained active transportation infrastructure, a crowded airport concourse with late passengers running to a gate, and busy urban road crossings with converging motor vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians.
These are examples of the mobility spaces—with their design, maintenance, and usage challenges as well as their growing levels of distracted users—that are intended for the deployment of PMRs for tasks such as goods delivery, monitoring, personal assistance, summer and winter maintenance, surveillance, and more.
Standards needs research
Aaron Prather, a thought leader in robotics, especially industrial and automated mobile robots (IMRs and AMRs) recently posted a plea for standards-targeted research: “We Need More Research That Creates Standards.” Calling for Research-to-Standards (R2S) initiatives, Prather’s focus is “consistent safety, quality, or interoperability,” facilitating the translation of “complex research into actionable, reliable standards,” and speed to market. He summarized with: “R2S initiatives bridge the gap between groundbreaking research and practical industry standards, creating a pathway where innovations can be quickly and safely integrated into everyday applications.”
While this call for safety, quality, and interoperability research is to be fully endorsed, I want to shine additional light on deployment standards which, in the case of PMRs, must go beyond device quality and safety. PMRs need an assured degree of design and management suitability for their operating domains. In other words, not only is interoperability among robotic systems and components critical, we also require it among robots, human bystanders, infrastructure, and municipal traffic management systems (both physical and signals) within PMR operating domains.
Today, we expect PMR designs and behaviours to conform to existing infrastructure, and to be deployed only where and when it is currently safe to do so. In the near future, we may also expect potential design synergies wherein infrastructure might be altered or optimized to include these devices. We saw this beginning 125 years ago as urban infrastructure began to be modified to accommodate the automobile. This meant modifications to human mobility within the right-of-way, including pedestrian infrastructure and its usage rules, some of which are today seen as detrimental to walkability.
Will standards nudge us toward the cities we want?
IMR and AMR systems have been confined to factories, warehouses, mines, and farms, where standardization has focussed on worker safety and system interoperability. But as PMRs serve tables in restaurants, scrub hospital corridors, guide wheelchairs in airport concourses, deliver groceries along sidewalks and bicycle lanes, we not only face an additional array of safety concerns, but we must now consider a very wide spectrum of situations that do not occur in most work environments.
When and how should PMRs navigate around or through a group of bystanders?
How many PMRs should be permitted to concurrently cross a roadway intersection?
When and how should a PMR communicate its intentions to bystanders, including the blind, deaf, or the inattentive?
If a PMR or its teleoperator is required to report problems unrelated to the robot or its task, how should that be done?
When and how should human-readable signage inform bystanders of the presence of PMRs operating close by?
When thinking about design and management suitability for an operating domain, we will soon be thinking about trade-offs between device design suitable for existing infrastructure, and weighing future device designs in the ongoing process of urban and building design. PMRs a decade from now will likely be more nimble, versatile, and varied and the space they share with human bystanders will be impacted and sometimes shaped by such factors.
We are often reminded that cities have been designed for the automobile. Pedestrian infrastructure today constrains the use and design of PMRs. But likely two trends will change this. PMR design will gradually overcome the constraints of pedestrian infrastructure and the slow renewal of this infrastructure will be influenced by expectations and standards for PMR deployment.
Will our urban mobility spaces in the next decades become increasingly pedestrian-oriented and/or accessibility-oriented? To encourage that, PMR deployment standards will need to have such intentions baked in.
Drafting ISO-4448
We invite you to join the conversation to help shape the new international standard by becoming a member of the Urban Robotics Foundation. As Executive Director of URF, the author (Bern Grush) also serves as the global lead for drafting "ISO-4448" - a new global standard that sets the parameters and procedures for "Intelligent transport systems — Public-area Mobile Robots (PMRs) and automated pathway devices". URF holds virtual round-table meetings for members to exchange ideas and contribute to the standards development. Academic researchers can join URF as individual researchers (US$500/year), as a small group/department (US$2500/year) or on behalf of students, professors and researchers employed at a university/college (US$5000/year).
The full name according to International Organization for Standards is: ISO TC204 WG19 DTS4448. TC204 refers to the ISO Technical Committee that is focused on Intelligent transport systems. WG19 refers to Working Group 19 that is focused on Mobility integration. The convenor of this working group is Knut Evensen. WG19 has 165 people registered representing 21 countries and 4 liaison organisations. Started in December 2018, the group currently has 43 standards in various stages ranging from proposal to publication.
Part 1 was published earlier this year and is available on the ISO website: https://www.iso.org/standard/81068.html The first version of the complete standard is expected to be finished by 2026. Please contact us if you have questions on this or any related topic.
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