Ontology Based Spatial Planning for Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been significant progress on Robotics. This development has widened the intervention fields of robots, particularly the assistance and interaction with humans. Improving the quality of this interaction requires robots to be endowed with representation and/or reasoning system for spatial knowledge. Our goal is to develop a planner allowing us to use human robot interaction to solve space sharing problems. This work is original, in that the representation of the same space for humans (symbolic, fuzzy) and robots (numeric) is not the same. Our objective is to combine human and robots representations of space in order to develop a mixed reasoning. We propose here an ontology called \textit{Space Ontology} as a spatial knowledge representation and reasoning system. In this paper, we focus on this ontology, and show how this type of knowledge can be profitably used for task planning. Our objective is to incorporate this ontology into a planner by extending the planning language PDDL.