Robotics and autonomous systems

New technologies such as autonomous systems are aimed to both bring economic growth and increase people's well-being. However, trustworthiness is a key aspect for people to use these systems. To produce and deploy such trustworthy autonomous systems, industry and governmental bodies need standards and guidelines. At the moment, there are no IEEE standards directly focused on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems.
One of the main challenges is that the study of trustworthy autonomous systems is intrinsically multi-disciplinary, spanning across fields such as robotics, systems engineering, software engineering, artificial intelligence, as well as safety, transparency, and ethics. Currently, the related standardization efforts are occurring separately in the different scientific communities and they are not specific to trustworthy autonomous systems.
Therefore, this project aims to address this gap by bridging the different standardisation efforts and by paving the way towards a standard on trustworthy autonomous systems.

One of the direct impacts of my activity is widening the stakeholders' network that can also learn from the standard development and share domain-specific information that is relevant to implement use cases for the standard. It may be of particular interest to the TEF-Health European Project, which is establishing a test and experimentation facilities network across the EU, and I am part of the team and IPN which is leading the Portuguese node.

The outcomes of this activity are very important for the robotics industry because it tackles concepts very close to real world deployment of robots to perform tasks, autonomously, within a robot group, and/or cooperating and/or collaborating with humans. This is a clear evolution of the IEEE RAS standards portfolio (previously focused on high-level concepts and definitions) and a valuable contribution to the robotics standards landscape in Europe and worldwide.