Shaping regulatory change using novel approaches to cobot safety.

Regulatory organisations are often complex, including people with a range of technical competences, each with different roles and responsibilities. You will find scientists, engineers, inspectors, and others with specialist technical skills and knowledge.

To keep pace with advancing technologies and an ever-evolving landscape, regulatory bodies need to be agile and continually grow the skills and expertise they utilise. There are numerous ways to approach this challenge, but collaboration lies at the heart of the solution.

Collaborative research on specific topics can form the basis of partnerships with academia that benefit both organisations through the exploration of answers to new challenges. Pilot projects with industrial partnerships and organisations in the Catapult Network can help regulators to gain experience of novel real-world applications. Partnerships with other regulators, both at home and abroad, minimise the repetition of work that has already been completed.

These partnerships feed important information to the regulator, which builds internal competence and can be used to help develop policy and guidance and feed into the development of international standards.

Partnerships can also help regulatory bodies to achieve deep technical knowledge that would normally be achieved by in-depth training and time spent working on real system design. This approach wouldn’t be suitable for day-to-day inspection and assessment activities but seeking advice from external organisations could help with reviewing new guidance or help with occasional accident investigation.

Through a collaborative approach we, in industry and academia, can support regulatory and standards bodies to build the skills, competencies and experience needed to solve the challenges of regulating autonomous technologies.

Dr James Law
Director of Innovation and Knowledge Exchange
Sheffield Robotics

Principal investigator of the CSI:Cobot project