The 2021 sales volume in the market of service robots is attractive. Expert reports from the International Federation of Robotics confirm 27 billion USD in total market share. Moreover, the number of new startups with the denomination of service robots nowadays constitutes 29% of the total amount of robotic companies recorded in the United States. Those data, among other similar figures, remark the need for formal development in the service robots area, including knowledge transfer and literature reviews. Furthermore, the COVID-19 spread accelerated business units and some research groups to invest time and effort into the field of service robotics. Therefore, this research work intends to contribute to the formalization of service robots as an area of robotics, presenting a systematic review of scientific literature. First, a definition of service robots according to fundamental ontology is provided, followed by a detailed review covering technological applications; state-of-the-art, commercial technology; and application cases indexed on the consulted databases.

Urban planning has a crucial role in helping cities meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and robust datasets to assess mobility accessibility are central to smart urban planning. These datasets provide the information necessary to perform detailed analyses that help develop targeted urban interventions that increase accessibility in cities as related to the emerging vision of the 15 Minute City. This study discusses the need for such data by performing a comparative urban accessibility analysis of two university campuses and their surrounding urban areas, here defined as the Stanford District, located in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States, and Distrito Tec in Monterrey, Mexico. The open-source tool Urban Mobility Accessibility Computer (UrMoAC) is used to assess accessibility measures in each district using available data. UrMoAC calculates distances and average travel times from block groups to major destinations using different transport modes considering the morphology of the city, which makes this study transferable and scalable. The results show that both areas have medium levels of accessibility if cycling is used as the primary mode of transportation. Hence, improving the safety and quality of cycling in both cities emerges as one of the main recommendations from the research. Finally, the results obtained can be used to generate public policies that address the specific needs of each community’s urban region based on their accessibility performance.