Our Mission

The research and development of various robotic technologies are becoming more and more popular in the world. However, we cannot use these technologies efficiently without having a detailed knowledge of their own specifications. There is yet another difficulty in reusing these technologies, that is, there are many differences in their implementation although they are developed for the same purpose. Obviously, the technologies for the same purpose should be treated in the same way. Especially for the ubiquitous network robots, it is important to standardize the usage of the robotic technologies so that various robots can work together in various places. Therefore, while we engage in research and development on new robotic technologies, we also engage in standardization of these technologies with the domestic and foreign research institutes through the several international standards groups .

Activities

Our standardization activities focus on two robotic technological fields, i.e., “location information” and “behavior information”.

“Location information” means the location and posture information of robots. The treatment of this information should be standardized so that we can know the robot’s location without caring about the types of robots and sensors. The standard specification of the robotic location information has been issued as RLS (Robotic Localization Service) through OMG (Object Management Group), which is known in CORBA and UML, in February 2010. Now, we are trying to liaise with ISO (International Organization for Standardization) to improve the connectivity with the disparate systems.

“Behavior information” means the information about the behavior of robots, especially the behavior concerning human-robot interaction. We are trying to standardize mechanisms for the information and instructions exchanged between the service application and the robotic functions for human-robot interaction. It would be possible to enhance reusability of service application programs because a service application program for a robot could then work on other robots regardless of the different robots. This mechanisms are going to be standardized as RoIS (Robotic Interaction Service) framework also in OMG.