Ubiquitous Semantics: Representing and Exploiting Knowledge, Geometry, and Language for Cognitive Robot Systems

Alexander Perzylo, Nikhil Somani, Stefan Profanter, Andre Gaschler, Sascha Griffiths, Markus Rickert and Alois Knoll

Proceedings of the Workshop Towards Intelligent Social Robots - Current Advances in Cognitive Robotics, IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS),

November 2015 · Seoul, South Korea

abstract

In this paper, we present an integrated approach to knowledge representation for cognitive robots. We combine knowledge about robot tasks, interaction objects including their geometric shapes, the environment, and natural language in a common ontological description. This description is based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and allows to automatically link and interpret these different kinds of information. Semantic descriptions are shared between object detection and pose estimation, task-level manipulation skills, and human-friendly interfaces. Through lifting the level of communication between the human operator and the robot system to an abstract level, we achieve more human-suitable interaction and thus a higher level of acceptance by the user. Furthermore, it increases the efficiency of communication. The benefits of our approach are highlighted by examples from the domains of industrial assembly and service robotics.

subject terms: robotics, smerobotics