Advanced Sensor Modules for ISO/IEC Compliant Emerging Robots

Dear Colleagues,

Robotics has been a core pillar in the manufacturing industry for several decades and is a multi-billion Euro industry today. As statistics reveal, growth in the robotics industry continues to be exponential. Since the installation of the first industrial robot in the 1960s, the sector has become established and is now beginning to expand into new service market and other real-world applications; the new scenarios considered require much closer human–robot interactions and complex situations and scenarios to be considered. Today, robotics is no longer a technology for only manufacturing but has evolved to also address much wider range of applications and domains (domestic, collaborative, underwater, hazardous, etc.) where a wide variety of services have to be provided to different end users. This evolution needs new approaches and new regulations to ensure safety of the new service robots that can facilitate the new types of human-robot interactions. New sensors are essential for ensuring the new service robots can be realised, the various safety-related and security-related situations can be successfully achieved and the emerging safety and security requirements complied with.

ISO (especially TC 199 (Safety of machinery) and TC 299 (Robotics)), and IEC (especially, TC44 (Safety of machinery – Electrotechnical aspects), TC 61 Safety of household and similar electrical appliances, TC62 (Electrical equipment in medical practice)) have the goal to develop high quality standards for the safety of robots as the applications grow from the industrial sector to service scenarios in medical and non-medical applications. In addition, international standardisation has sought to foster the growth of robotic markets by introducing standards to harmonise robot terminology, robot performance assessment and promote inter-operability by developing robot modularity concepts.

The standards provide global organizations and individuals with valuable information on how to design and implement approaches to realise robots in an internationally acceptable way. Value is added to the robot investments by providing clear best practices on how to ensure compliant safe installations, as well as providing standardized interfaces and performance criteria. Most of the new approaches rely on ensuring that good sensory information can be obtained to ensure the information provided is reliable and secure and the decision making will meet the new requirements for safety, performance and inter-operability.

In this Special Issue, papers focus on the emerging regulations and the development and integration of new sensors, sensor systems and sensor modules to be used in new scenarios for the robots to be able to achieve the design goals. Practical experimental results are particularly encouraged, as are papers setting advances in the wider context of international standards.

Prof. Dr. Donghan Kim
Prof. Dr. Gurvinder Singh Virk
Prof. Dr. Soon-Geul Lee
Dr. Canjun Yang
Guest Editors

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• Robot Performance Measuring Sensor and Sensor System
• Sensory issues related to Robotic Safety 
• International Standards - Robot Terminology and Characteristics - Service Robot Safety - Medical Robot Safety and Essential Performance - Collaborative Industrial Robot Safety - Performance of Service Robot - Modularity for Robotics 
• Sensors, Sensor Systems and Sensor Modules 
• Service robot applications 
• ISO and IEC requirements 
• Safety-related situations 
• Security-related situations 
• Performance assessment 
• Inter-operability