An Ontology-Based Approach to Enable Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Worker–Cobot Agile Manufacturing

Abstract

Abstract:There is no doubt that the rapid development in robotics technology has dramatically changed the interaction model between the Industrial Robot (IR) and the worker. As the current robotic technology has afforded very reliable means to guarantee the physical safety of the worker during a close proximity interaction with the IR. Therefore, new forms of cooperation between the robot and the worker can now be achieved. Collaborative/Cooperative robotics is the new branch of industrial robotics which empowers the idea of cooperative manufacturing. Cooperative manufacturing significantly depends on the existence of a collaborative/cooperative robot (cobot). A cobot is usually a Light-Weight Robot (LWR) which is capable of operating safely with the human co-worker in a shared work environment. This is in contrast with the conventional IR which can only operate in isolation from the worker workspace, due to the fact that the conventional IR can manipulate very heavy objects, which makes it so dangerous to operate in direct contact with the worker. There is a slight difference between the definition of collaboration and cooperation in robotics. In cooperative robotics, both the worker and the robot are performing tasks over the same product in the same shared workspace but not simultaneously. Collaborative robotics has a similar definition, except that the worker and the robot are performing a simultaneous task. Gathering the worker and the cobot in the same manufacturing workcell can provide an easy and cheap method to flexibly customize the production. Moreover, to adapt with the production demands in the real time of production, without the need to stop or to modify the production operations. There are many challenges and problems that can be addressed in the cooperative manufacturing field. However, one of the most important challenges in this field is the representation of the cooperative manufacturing environment and components. Thus, in order to accomplish the cooperative manufacturing concept, a proper approach is required to describe the shared environment between the worker and the cobot. The cooperative manufacturing shared environment includes the cobot, the co-worker, and other production components such as the product itself. Furthermore, the whole cooperative manufacturing system components need to communicate and share their knowledge, to reason and process the shared information, which eventually gives the control solution the capability of obtaining collective manufacturing decisions. Putting into consideration that the control solution should also provide a natural language which is human readable and in the same time can be understood by the machine (i.e., the cobot). Accordingly, a distributed control solution which combines an ontology-based Multi-Agent System (MAS) and a Business Rule Management System (BRMS) is proposed, in order to solve the mentioned challenges in the cooperative manufacturing, which are: manufacturing knowledge representation, sharing, and reasoning.

Assessing the effect of persuasive robots interactive social cues on users’ psychological reactance, liking, trusting beliefs and compliance

“…In the not too distant future, one could anticipate that humans will share tasks, interact and collaborate with robots. This will be so for diverse areas such as manufacturing to assist humans in production lines [1] or in education where robots will take more social roles such as that of teachers [2], or even in hospitals where we could soon get used to meet a robot waiting for us to welcome, examine, diagnose, treat, and prescribe medicine for us, instead of human health workers [3]. Crucially, in many of these roles, robots will need to be able to persuade humans.…”

Failure Detection and Prevention for Cyber-Physical Systems Using Ontology-Based Knowledge Base

“…Pradorn et al [29] proposed an approach that captures, creates, and represents ontology for organization development by using knowledge engineering. Sadik et al [30] presented a distributed control solution that incorporates an ontology-based multi-agent and business rule management system to address the challenges in cooperative manufacturing.…”

RTPO: A Domain Knowledge Base for Robot Task Planning

“…The ontology theory is also applied to other fields, such as industrial production collaboration [27] and navigation in indoor scenarios [28,29]. The work in References [27,30] portrays the domain knowledge for the robot task planning in logic language BC [31,32]. However, this approach is disadvantageous in sharing knowledge and updating the new knowledge inferred.…”