Roboethics - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 66

• A professional service robot or a service robot for professional use is a service

robot used for a commercial task, usually operated by a properly trained opera-
tor. Examples are cleaning robot for public places, delivery robot in offi ces or
hospitals, fi refi ghting robot, rehabilitation robot and surgery robot in hospitals.
In this context an operator is a person designated to start, monitor and stop the
intended operation of a robot or a robot system.

According to these defi nitions, service robots require a 'degree of autonomy',
but not full autonomy or fully automatic operation, unlike industrial robots. This
may range from fully autonomous systems without active human interaction through
some degree of human-robot interaction to full teleoperation. Human-robot interac-
tion involves information and action exchanges between the user and robot via a
user interface in order to achieve a task, which may involve the robot assisting the
user. Whether a robot should be considered a service or industrial robot depends on
the application it is being used in, not the structure of the particular robot. Service
robots are often, though not necessarily, mobile and may have several arms attached
to a mobile platform and controlled analogously to the arms of an industrial robot.
Statistics produced by the International Federation of Robotics on industrial
( http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ ) and service ( http://www.ifr.org/
service- robots/statistics/ ) robots show that personal service robots are the category
with the largest number of robots sold each year. However, the value of each robot
is much lower than for industrial and professional service robots, as they are pro-
duced for a mass market. The data can be summarised as follows:

1. Personal service robots: (1) about 3 million sold in 2012, worth US$1.2 billion;
(2) an increase of 20% over 2011; (3) projected sales for 2013-2016 of about 22
million units worth US$5.6.
2. Professional service robots: (1) 16.067 units sold in 2012, worth US$3.42 bil-
lion; (2) number of units sold increased 2% from 2011, but their value dropped
by 1%; (3) projected sales for 2013-2016 of about 94,8000 units worth US$17.1
billion; (4) more than 126,000 robots have been included in these statistics since
1998, but varying life spans make it impossible to estimate how many are still in
operation.
3. Industrial service robots: (1) 159,346 units sold in 2012, (2) decrease by 4%
from 2011; (3) sales for 2013 projected to increase by 2% to 162,000 units;
(4) robot installations are estimated to increase by 6% on average per year from
2014 to 2016; (5) the total global stock of operational industrial robots at the end
of 2012 was between 1.235 and 1.5 million units.

By far the greatest uses of industrial robots are in the automotive (40%) and
electronics and electrical (21%) industries, followed by the chemical, rubber and
plastics industries. A few per cent are used in each of the metal products, communi-
cation, food and industrial machinery industries ( http://www.ifr.org/industrial-
robots/statistics/ ) . About 40% of professional service robots were used by the
military aka 'defence' applications in 2012; 8% in medicine, including robotic
surgery and therapy; and 9% in logistic systems. Medical robots are the most expen-
sive in this category, with an average price of US$1.5 million.