Domain-specific ontologies support system design and can establish a framework for fulfilling user-level, safety, or ethical requirements. The IEEE 7007–2021 Ontological Standard for ethically driven robotics and automation systems is the first industry standard to introduce a structure of ontologies concerning robot ethics and related fields, such as data privacy, transparency, responsibility, and accountability, offering a systems science approach to support the ethically aligned design of complex cyber–physical systems (CPSs) and robots particularly. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the main ontological commitments composing the foundation of the standard, the rationale behind their development, together with use cases of applications. Future directions for ethically aligned robotics and artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems along IEEE 7007–2021 are outlined, taking into account the exponentially growing fields of service and medical robotics.

Unambiguous definition of spatial position and orientation has crucial importance for robotics. In this paper we propose an ontology about positioning. It is part of a more extensive core ontology being developed by the IEEE RAS Working Group on ontologies for robotics and automation. The core ontology should provide a common ground for further ontology development in the field. We give a brief overview of concepts in the core ontology and then describe an integrated approach for representing quantitative and qualitative position information.