With the emergence of mobile robots, including service robots for use in public, domestic and industrial environments, a more comprehensive standard to cover the new robots and associated technologies is needed. New scopes of the robots applications involve almost in every case an autonomous system that can potentially cause harm to the environment, including people or malfunction and fail the mission completely. ISO has developed a set of standards supporting aspects of robot design such as performance measurement, safety assurance, user interfaces and similar for industrial robots manipulators. Evolving robot applications require the standards to be revised to incorporate requirements for new robotic domains. This prompted a group of international robotics experts in 2007 to initiate a development of new terms and regulations and modify the current robotics standard, ISO 8373, to include terms that are applicable to the new generation of robots. This paper provides an outline of the progress of the working group and the associated challenges in updating the international robotics vocabulary standard.