RoboPASS: Getting Ready for an Innovative Era

Join us in Milton Keynes --the UK’s Urban Laboratory- and guide the future as robotic devices take their place in every day life. As robotics and autonomous smart machines increasingly move into everyday use, working alongside people, on production lines, delivering groceries and takeaways, cleaning airports, and assisting surgery, many new business ideas are driving opportunities for growth and societal benefit. Milton Keynes, the UK’s urban laboratory has long been home to pavement robots, self-driving vehicles and drones. We know it’s important to harness these new technologies in the right way, with the appropriate controls in place, guided by values and good practice, standards, and national initiative that will ensure the UK and its innovators can lead the way in safe and productive development of innovative services. That’s why we are establishing RoboPASS—a licensing framework that can be used across the nation to assure and oversee safe and secure robotic deployments in open public spaces. As part of Milton Keynes Tech Week, the City Council is hosting a series of workshops to share more about what we learned as we developed the framework and to hear your views on what we are creating. Doors open from 12:30 where you are invited to participate in round table discussions, followed by an evening reception and panel. Doors open from 12:30 (lunch provided) 13:00 – RoboPass the project – Insights and Recommendations 13:30 & 15:30 Round table sessions run twice giving all attendees the opportunity to participate in two of three 1.5 hour sessions 1/ Navigating the opportunity: use cases, benefits and concerns This session focusses on collating understanding and emergent service development and deployment experience for potential uses of mobile robotic device-enabled services. The session focusses on the economic and social benefit cases, associated impacts to be anticipated such as the demands on public infrastructure (physical and digital), nuisance and vandalism, or crowding to review considerations for viable service delivery. Participants are invited to consult on the specific uses anticipated by the project and any others that contribute to the body of practice knowledge for deploying mobile robotic devices in public spaces: • Delivery of groceries, take- away meals and other consumer goods, • Supporting health and social care through patient monitoring to prescription pickup and delivery • Inspecting public infrastructure, eg detecting failed street lights, full litter bins or cracks in pavement • Assisting with maintenance including weeding or de-icing publicways • Wayfinding and citizen/visitor interaction 2/Licensing and Permitting: Equipping Council’s with the information they need This workshop examines the licensing process developed within RoboPASS and underlying structures needed to issue licenses together with the collective understanding needed to create and manage governance models and reporting. It will outline the proposed licensing and permitting stages, performance indicators, evidence and testing regimes that are needed to support a practical pathway for real‑world adoption of robotics in urban and public spaces. These include expectations for safely tackling the complexities of navigating these spaces, task delivery, service viability and human-robot interaction as well as considerations for urban planning, infrastructure, and the rules that maintain respect for public rights and social value crucial to fostering public acceptance and trust. 3/ Assurance factors and underpinning standards This session reviews the taxonomy of assurance factors being advanced by the project with the support of BSI covering key assurance domains required to support safe, lawful and trusted deployment of autonomous robots in shared public environments, including system integrity, autonomous decision-making, operational safety, security, and governance. The work maps the most relevant national and international standards from the robotics industry and other adjacent sectors, highlights where established standards can be directly applied, adapted, or combined to support assurance claims and examines assurance gaps where current standards are insufficient. The aim is to inform priorities for RoboPASS and potential pathways for supporting a defensible assurance framework for publicway robotics. 17:30 pm - Evening Reception & Panel Getting Ready for an Innovative Era