Jan 18 2019
The Object Management Group® (OMG®), https://www.omg.org/ an international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium, issued a request for proposals for a Robotic Service Ontology (https://www.omg.org/).
The RFP solicits submissions for a set of basic ontologies that provide a semantic model of robotic services and related robotic functional components that can support communications and interoperability between robotic services and enable composition of such services.
A service robot is a robot that provides services to people or on their behalf in the environment in which they live or work. Examples range from robots designed to assist seniors or those with disabilities with basic chores, to robots operating in hospitals or clinics that are able to answer patient questions, to self-driving vehicles and many others. These kinds of robots are becoming increasingly common. The software supporting service robots is complex, and requires a variety of interfaces that must be standardized, so that the building block components can work together consistently and most importantly, safely.
According to Koji Kamei, RFP author, co-chair of the OMG Robotics Domain Task Force and group leader of the Department of Cloud Intelligence at ATR, "The robotics industry needs a common vocabulary or ontology in order to describe robotic services and the components that comprise those services and that extends existing robotics ontologies such as the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Core Ontology for Robotics and Automation (CORA). CORA (IEEE 1872-2005) is derived from and extends the ISO 8373:2012 standard, developed by the ISO/TC184/SC2 Working Group, which defines—in natural language—important terms in the domain of Robotics and Automation (R&A). Such an ontology will assist not only in communications among robots and between robots and the humans they support, but will enable developers of both robotic services and robotic functional components to compose higher order robotic services from well-defined, consistent building blocks (components) and have confidence that the resulting services will work together as designed."
Both members and non-members of OMG can participate in the process by submitting a Letter of Intent http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc.cgi?loi by September 16, 2019. In order to become a submitter, individually or as part of a submission team, companies must become members of OMG by the initial submission deadline currently set to November 11, 2019.