waarnabotsingen

Waarnabotsingen is a term used in Dutch-language robotics and safety discourse to refer to the practice of deploying autonomous observation robots to monitor, record, and analyze interactions that may lead to collisions between moving agents in shared environments. The concept emphasizes understanding how perception, prediction, and avoidance are performed by autonomous systems and how these processes can fail under real-world conditions.

The word is a portmanteau of waarnemen (to observe) and botsingen (collisions) and has appeared in discussions on traffic safety, industrial automation, and research into multi-agent systems.

Typical waarnabotsingen setups combine sensor suites such as cameras, LiDAR, radar, and GPS, with data fusion, scenario annotation, and analytical models that reconstruct events and test how changes to perception or decision-making would improve safety.

Applications include urban and highway traffic safety research, collider-like warehouse operations, drone traffic management, and assistive robotics in public spaces.

Challenges include protecting privacy, ensuring data integrity, dealing with biases in perception models, and translating findings into enforceable safety standards and regulations.

In the broader literature, waarnabotsingen is related to robotics safety, human–robot interaction, and multi-agent systems, serving as a bridge between empirical testing and policy development.