Knowledge-Based Industrial Robotics

When robots are working in dynamic environments, close to humans lacking extensive knowledge of robotics, there is a strong need to simplify the user interaction and make the system execute as autonomously as possible. For industrial robots working side-by-side with humans in manufacturing industry, AI systems are necessary to lower the demand on programming time and expertise. We are convinced that only by building a system with appropriate knowledge and reasoning services, we can simplify the robot programming sufficiently to meet those demands and still get a robust and efficient task execution. In this paper, we present a system we have realized that aims at fulfilling the above demands. The paper focuses on the ontologies we have created for robotic devices and manufacturing tasks, and presents examples of AI-related services using the semantic descriptions of the skills to help the user instruct the robot adequately.