The global industrial standards organization ASTM International has launched an initiative to accelerate the process of setting safety and performance thresholds for “rapidly converging technologies.”
West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania-based ASTM says its standards improve safety and performance in manufacturing and materials, products and processes, and systems and services. The group also provides services such as training, proficiency testing, certification, and its new portal service Compass.
According to ASTM, convergent technologies are those that lie at the forefront of innovation, but advance interdependently, rather than in isolation. For example, artificial intelligence is embedded in robotics and manufacturing systems; semiconductors and energy infrastructure underpin them all.
Currently, more than 40 national governments now publish their own lists of critical and emerging technologies, and those lists diverge and shift. Rather than track those labels, ASTM engages CETs at the intersections where these technologies actually meet, thereby creating the opportunity to develop standards alongside technologies rather than after they propagate across society.
ASTM says it will achieve its goal by creating a new Critical and Emerging Technologies (CET) Division, formerly the Advanced Manufacturing Division. That arm will extend the standards model used in advanced manufacturing to address technologies that are converging fastest.
“A technology is industrialized and at scale when the quality holds, the results repeat, and it performs the same way globally,” says Mohsen Seifi, Ph.D., vice president of the Critical and Emerging Technologies Division at ASTM International. “That is the bar. We reach it faster by engaging early, shaping standards while the technology is still taking form, and carrying the work through to training and certification with partners across industry, government, and academia worldwide.”
The new CET division, which is active in approximately 10 ASTM committees and cooperates across roughly 25 countries, assesses critical and emerging technology by where standards are most needed, and accelerates development by defining roadmaps, applying market intelligence, and building training and certification opportunities.
The newly launched division maintains advanced manufacturing standardization as its flagship, incorporating cutting-edge topics at various levels of maturity, including:
- Robotics, exoskeletons, and commercial space, with dedicated committees and a growing body of standards
- Drones and unmanned systems, supported by a long-established committee and a mature body of standards
- Emerging technologies like semiconductors, quantum, and biotechnology, still the subject of pre-standardization through ASCET, the division’s center of excellence that operates the U.S. National Center of Excellence for CET Standardization under a cooperative agreement with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
- Artificial intelligence, a rapidly growing focus area for ASCET and for F50, ASTM’s newest committee on artificial intelligence in manufacturing systems, which drew more than 100 organizations from more than 20 countries in its first months
