A Spatial Ontology for Human-robot Interaction

Robotics quickly evolved in the recent years. This development widened the intervention fields of robots. Robots interact with humans in order to serve them. Improving the quality of this interaction requires to endow robots with spatial representation and/or reasoning system. Many works have been dedicated to this purpose. Most of them take into account metric, symbolic spatial relationships. However, they do not consider fuzzy relations given by linguistic variables in humans language in human-robot interaction. These relations are not understood by robots. Our objective is to combine human representation (symbolic, fuzzy) of space with the robot’s one to develop a mixed reasoning. More precisely, we propose an ontology to manage both spatial relations (topological, metric), fuzziness in spatial representation. This ontology allows a hierarchical organization of space which is naturally manageable by humans and easily understandable by robots. Our ontology will be incorporated into a planner by extending the planning language PDDL.

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