The Standards Behind Robotics: ISO 10218, IEEE RAS, ROS, and the Arduino/Microchip Ecosystem

Robotics sits at an unusual intersection: formal international safety standards on one side, and a de facto hobbyist hardware ecosystem (Arduino, Microchip) on the other that most real DIY and even early commercial projects are actually built on. Knowing both layers matters, whichever side of the hobbyist-to-industrial line your project sits on.

The formal international safety standards

ISO/TC 299 is the ISO technical committee dedicated specifically to robotics, and it maintains the standards that matter most once a robot moves from a hobby bench to anything shared with people:

• ISO 10218 (Parts 1 and 2): safety requirements for industrial robots, covering the robot itself and its full system integration. Recently revised (the 2025 edition), with collaborative-robot safety requirements formerly published separately now folded into the updated ISO 10218-2.
• ISO 13482: safety requirements specifically for personal care robots, the standard most relevant to consumer-facing assistive or companion robots rather than industrial arms.
• ISO/TS 15066: collaborative robot safety, covering robots designed to work directly alongside humans without a safety cage, increasingly relevant as smaller collaborative arms become affordable for hobbyist and small-shop use.

The professional and research body

IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE RAS) is the main professional body for robotics research and standards development, and works alongside ISO/TC 299 on several of the standards above, publishing the technical papers and conference proceedings that most new robotics techniques first appear in before reaching commercial hardware.

The software standard behind most serious robotics projects

ROS (Robot Operating System), developed and governed today under Open Robotics, is not a government or ISO standard, but it is the de facto software architecture standard the robotics community has converged on for sensor integration, motion planning, and inter-component messaging. If you move beyond a single Arduino sketch into a project with multiple sensors, navigation, and coordinated behavior (exactly the kind of multi-sensor scanning robot covered elsewhere on this site), ROS is very likely where you’ll end up, and its message and node architecture is worth learning even before you need its full feature set.

Industrial communication standards

OPC Foundation maintains OPC UA, a platform-independent industrial communication standard increasingly used to connect robots and automation equipment on factory floors, relevant once a project moves from a standalone robot toward one that needs to report status to or receive commands from a larger automated system.

The hobbyist hardware ecosystem, which is where most real projects actually start

Arduino and Microchip aren’t formal standards bodies, but their published technical references function as the de facto specification most DIY and small-scale commercial robotics projects are built against:

• Arduino‘s board pinouts, the AVR/ARM microcontroller reference architecture, and its open-source IDE and library ecosystem are what the robotic arm project on this site is built around, and are genuinely the standard starting point recommended across hobbyist robotics communities.
• Microchip (which now also owns Atmel, the original maker of the AVR chips Arduino boards are built on) publishes the detailed datasheets and reference designs that underpin a huge share of embedded robotics hardware, well beyond just Arduino-branded boards.

Frequently asked questions

Do hobbyist projects like the ones on this site need to comply with ISO 10218 or ISO 13482?
No, those standards specifically apply to commercial industrial and personal care robots intended for manufacturing or market release, not personal hobbyist builds. They’re worth knowing about regardless, since the safety principles they encode (proper e-stop design, limiting force/speed near people, fail-safe behavior) are good practice to borrow for any project that moves or has moving parts, even a hobby one.

Is it worth learning ROS for a first robotics project, or is that overkill?
For a first single-purpose project (a basic robotic arm, a simple line-following robot), plain Arduino code is usually simpler and faster to get working. ROS earns its complexity once a project has multiple sensors that need to be fused, coordinated motion planning, or components that need to run on separate processing units and communicate, which is closer to what the multi-sensor scanning robot project on this site eventually grows into if extended further.