In this paper we report on a recent public experiment that shows two robots making pancakes using web instructions. In the experiment, the robots retrieve instructions for making pancakes from the World Wide Web and generate robot action plans from the instructions. This task is jointly performed by two autonomous robots: The first robot opens and closes cupboards and drawers, takes a pancake mix from the refrigerator, and hands it to the robot B. The second robot cooks and flips the pancakes, and then delivers them back to the first robot. While the robot plans in the scenario are all percept-guided, they are also limited in different ways and rely on manually implemented sub-plans for parts of the task. We will thus discuss the potential of the underlying technologies as well as the research challenges raised by the experiment.

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This paper describes CRAM (Cognitive Robot Abstract Machine) as a software toolbox for the design, the implementation, and the deployment of cognition-enabled autonomous robots performing everyday manipulation activities. CRAM equips autonomous robots with lightweight reasoning mechanisms that can infer control decisions rather than requiring the decisions to be preprogrammed. This way CRAMprogrammed autonomous robots are much more flexible, reliable, and general than control programs that lack such cognitive capabilities. CRAM does not require the whole domain to be stated explicitly in an abstract knowledge base. Rather, it grounds symbolic expressions in the knowledge representation into the perception and actuation routines and into the essential data structures of the control programs. In the accompanying video, we show complex mobile manipulation tasks performed by our household robot that were realized using the CRAM infrastructure.

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Abstract-The vision of the RoboEarth project is to design a knowledge-based system to provide web and cloud services that can transform a simple robot into an intelligent one. In this work we describe the RoboEarth semantic mapping system. The semantic map is composed of (1) an ontology to code the concepts and relations in maps and objects, and (2) a SLAM map providing the scene geometry and the object locations with respect to the robot. We propose to ground the terminological knowledge in the robot perceptions by means of the SLAM map of objects. RoboEarth boosts mapping by providing: (1) a subdatabase of object models relevant for the task at hand, obtained by semantic reasoning, which improves recognition by reducing computation and the false positive rate; (2) the sharing of semantic maps between robots, and (3) software as a service to externalize in the cloud the more intensive mapping computations, while meeting the mandatory hard real time constraints of the robot.To demonstrate the RoboEarth cloud mapping system, we investigate two action recipes that embody semantic map building in a simple mobile robot. The first recipe enables semantic map building for a novel environment while exploiting available prior information about the environment. The second recipe searches for a novel object, with the efficiency boosted thanks to the reasoning on a semantically annotated map. Our experimental results demonstrate that by using RoboEarth cloud services, a simple robot can reliably and efficiently build the semantic maps needed to perform its quotidian tasks. In addition, we show the synergetic relation of the SLAM map of objects that grounds the terminological knowledge coded in the ontology.Note to Practitioners-RoboEarth is a cloud-based knowledge base for robots that transforms a simple robot into an intelligent one thanks to the web services provided. As mapping is a mandatory element on most of the robot systems, we focus on the RoboEarth semantic mapping for robot systems, showing the benefits of the combination of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Map building), and knowledge-based reasoning. We show the qualities of our system by means of two experiments: (1) building a map of a novel environment boosted by prior information and (2) efficient searching for a novel object thanks to the knowledgebased reasoning techniques. We can conclude that RoboEarth enables the execution of the proposed methods as web and cloud services that enable advanced perception in a simple robot.