RTPO: A Domain Knowledge Base for Robot Task Planning

Abstract

Knowledge can enhance the intelligence of robots’ high-level decision-making. However, there is no specific domain knowledge base for robot task planning in this field. Aiming to represent the knowledge in robot task planning, the Robot Task Planning Ontology (RTPO) is first designed and implemented in this work, so that robots can understand and know how to carry out task planning to reach the goal state. In this paper, the RTPO is divided into three parts: task ontology, environment ontology, and robot ontology, followed by a detailed description of these three types of knowledge, respectively. The OWL (Web Ontology Language) is adopted to represent the knowledge in robot task planning. Then, the paper proposes a method to evaluate the scalability and responsiveness of RTPO. Finally, the corresponding task planning algorithm is designed based on RTPO, and then the paper conducts experiments on the basis of the real robot TurtleBot3 to verify the usability of RTPO. The experimental results demonstrate that RTPO has good performance in scalability and responsiveness, and the robot can achieve given high-level tasks based on RTPO.

Ontology-based task planning for autonomous unmanned system: framework and principle

“…RTPO [11](Robot Task Planning Ontology) is a kind of indoor service-oriented robot task planning ontology. It uses OWL language to describe the domain knowledge of the robot and designs a task planning algorithm based on RTPO.…”

“…The key to realizing autonomy is knowledge, such as knowledge of the battlefield environment, mission specifics, task specifics, and the knowledge of the unmanned system itself. How to store and represent the operation-related knowledge, enable unmanned systems to conduct task planning according to human's high-level task order, has become a new research field [11,12]. Based on the review of several ontology-based approaches for autonomy systems, uncertainty representation, and modeling methods, the concept of ontology-based task planning is proposed, and the principles of constructing task ontology are introduced.…”

Extending Referring Expression Generation through shared knowledge about past Human-Robot collaborative activity

“…Since ontologies are fully suitable to represent semantic information about entities and their relations, they have been used to represent task planning knowledge. In [29], a Robot Task Planning Ontology (RTPO) is proposed but the model does not consider the rich semantics involved by the hierarchical nature and intricacies of human-robot joint activities.…”

Cognitive Robotics and Control

“…In a different way, computational solutions are based on ontologies and knowledge representation. Aiming to represent the knowledge in robot task planning, the Robot Task Planning Ontology (RTPO) is first designed and implemented in Reference [10], so that robots can understand and know how to carry out task planning to reach the goal state. Experimental results demonstrate good performance in scalability and responsiveness.…”