Smart Cities, Smarter Robots
- Oct 12
- 2 min read
Author: Lee St James
Date Published: October 12, 2025
On September 30th, we hosted a workshop titled: "Smart Cities, Smarter Robots: Ensuring Safe and Effective Integration". The workshop featured guest speakers, Adam Beck, Global Head of Urban Planning for URF and Frederik Ross, Business Development Manager, Odense Robotics and ITK Aarhus Kommune.
We began with an overview of 'what is a public-area mobile robot?" and "How might PMRs impact urban planning?"
Adam Beck took us through a number of use cases and talked about the wide range of governance issues that need to be addressed by urban planners.
We reviewed the global regulatory landscape:
We then heard from Frederik Ross about the new regulations in Denmark:
The Danish government modified the rules associated with testing outdoor mobile robots as shown in this slide, enabling testing in more realistic environments and simplifying the application process for companies to test PMRs:
We reviewed URF's work on ISO-4448 and ISO-25614; ensuring the participants had a framework for successful adoption of PMRs through standards that help to mitigate risk:
Here is an example of the topics covered in ISO-4448 Part 7:
We then introduced the concept of developing a 'regulatory roadmap' for PMRs based on the following objectives:
Develop regulation in stages
Manage complexity
Align with technology evolution
Improve compliance and safety
Throughout all stages of PMR/technology innovation and deployment
Maximize benefits
Economic, accessibility, environmental and social
Minimize total cost of regulatory development
We explored: "At what level of governance should PMR regulations be established?"
We reviewed what we call the "Deployment Maturity Matrix" - discussing the six deployment pillars and five stages of maturity for any successful technology deployment:
We then invited participants to determine the best path forward:
As always, we are thankful for our members, sponsors and partners who support the important work we are doing:
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