Ontological Concepts for Information Sharing in Cloud Robotics
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Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Ontological Concepts for Information Sharing in Cloud Robotics Edison Pignaton de Freitas · Joanna Isabelle Olszewska · Joel Lu´ıs Carbonera · Sandro R. Fiorini · Alaa Khamis · S. Veera Ragavan · Marcos E. Barreto · Edson Prestes · Maki K. Habib · Signe Redfield · Abdelghani Chibani · Paulo Goncalves · Julita Bermejo-Alonso · Ricardo Sanz · Elisa Tosello · Alberto Olivares-Alarcos · Andrea Aparecida Konzen · Jo~aoQuintas · Howard Li Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract Recent research and developments in Cloud Robotics (CR) require appropriate knowledge repres- Edison Pignaton de Freitas entation to ensure interoperable data, information, and Joel Lu´ısCarbonera knowledge sharing within cloud infrastructures. As an Edson Prestes Andrea Aparecida Konzen important branch of the Internet of Things (IoT), these Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil demands to advance it forward motivates academic and E-mail: [email protected] industrial sectors to invest on it. The IEEE `Ontologies Joanna Isabelle Olszewska for Robotics and Automation' Working Group (ORA University of West of Scotland, UK WG) has been developing standard ontologies for differ- Alaa Khamis ent robotic domains, including industrial and autonom- General Motors, Canada ous robots. The use of such robotic standards has the Veera Ragavan Sampath Kumar potential to benefit the Cloud Robotic Community (CRC) Monash University, Malaysia. as well, supporting the provision of ubiquitous intel- Marcos E. Barreto ligent services by the CR-based systems. This paper Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. explores this potential by developing an ontological ap- Maki K. Habib proach for effective information sharing in cloud robot- The American University in Cairo, Egypt ics scenarios. It presents an extension to the existing on- Signe Redfield tological standards to cater for the CR domain. The use US Naval Research Laboratory, USA of the new ontological elements is illustrated through its Abdelghani Chibani use in a couple of CR case studies. To the best of our Sandro R. Fiorini knowledge, this is the first work ever that implements Universit´eParis-Est Cr´eteil,France an ontology comprising concepts and axioms applicable Paulo J. S. Gon¸calves to the CR domain. IDMEC, Instituto Polit´ecnicode Castelo Branco, Portugal Julita Bermejo-Alonso Keywords Knowledge-Based Systems · System Ricardo Sanz Interoperability · Automated Collaboration · Cloud Universidad Polit´ecnicade Madrid, Spain Robotics · Multi-Agent Systems · Autonomous Elisa Tosello Robotics · Robotics and Automation University of Padova, Italy Alberto Olivares-Alarcos Institut de Rob`oticai Inform`aticaIndustrial, CSIC-UPC, 1 Introduction Llorens i Artigas 4-6, 08028 Barcelona, Spain Jo~aoQuintas Cloud Robotics (CR) has emerged, in the last decade, Instituto Pedro Nunes, Portugal as an important research area potentially enhancing Howard Li the usability and application areas of autonomous ro- University of New Brunswick, Canada botic systems by integrating reconfigurable, computa- 2 Edison Pignaton de Freitas et al. tional and storage resources, applications and services botics Platform and IBM Watson Cloud Robot, re- into collaborative, shared cloud systems (Kehoe et al., spectively, as cloud robotics platforms. Other cloud ro- 2015a). Within the context of Internet of Things (IoT), botics platforms emerged as spin-offs from research pro- it is able to provide scalable ubiquitous intelligence by jects, like Rapyuta (a spin-off from RoboEarth and ETH means of networking robots beyond time and space Zurich), or from university projects, like RoboTurk (Stan- constraints (Rahimi et al., 2017) combining concepts ford University) and RoboBrain (Cornell University). from robotics, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and Robot Operating System (ROS) also provides an eco- cloud computing, leading to important applications in system to support cloud robotics. Hence, industrial ap- areas such as smart cities (Marques et al., 2019), se- plications can also benefit from these advances toward mantic sensor networks (Bruckner et al., 2012), smart Cloud Robotic Systems (CRS), since an autonomous in- military networks (Leal et al., 2019), and cloud manu- dustrial robot can be viewed as a subclass of an autonom- facturing (Lu and Xu, 2019). ous robot (Bayat et al., 2016). In this context, the concept of autonomous robot is understood as a goal-oriented intelligent system that Due to the importance of CR and the inherent need can function, decide, and interact autonomously within for standards that support its growth, this work aims, a structured or unstructured, static or dynamic and on the one hand, to focus on the identification and fully or partially observable environments without ex- formalization of some of CR notions that are important plicit human guidance (Bayat et al., 2016). As stated in for this area. On the other hand, as the proposed set (Fiorini et al., 2017), the robot is considered as a type of concepts specifically developed for the CR domain of agent in the environment under concern. This un- extends the Core Ontology for Robotics and Automa- derstanding extends the idea of agents for cloud-based tion (CORA)ontology (Prestes et al., 2013b), it could systems, as described in (Sim, 2012), which considers be potentially included in the standard ontology for software agents only, and consistent with the abstract autonomous robots under development by the IEEE concept of agent presented in (Fiorini et al., 2017), thus Autonomous Robotics Working Group (AuR)1. making the proposed extension coherent for the CR do- main. The main contributions of this work are: (1) the CR eases the transition from networked robotics to formalization of additional concepts to the existing stand- more advanced uses of multi-agents systems (Hu et al., ard which could be used for CR as well as support the 2012) towards the provision of intelligent services in the development of further ones in this domain; and (2) sup- IoT context (Kunst et al., 2018). The rationale behind port the effort being done by the IEEE ORA AuR in CR is the possibility to take advantage of the benefits defining ontological concepts for robotics applications. of sharing data and processing resources provided by Additionally, this paper brings a comprehensive over- cloud-based systems in order to enhance and to enlarge view of how ontologies can be used in the CR domain the power and the usefulness of robotic systems, ac- to enhance machine-to-machine communication, and a cording to their specific needs (Quintas et al., 2011). couple of useful and comprehensive case-study scenarios When using the cloud, a robot could improve its cap- using the defined concepts illustrating how practition- abilities of image understanding, language translation, ers could use ontologies in this domain. speech recognition (Zinchenko et al., 2017), path plan- ning, and/or 3D mapping (Guizzo, 2011). This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the Cloud Robotics landscape and related work, dis- Regarding the sharing of data and services (Xie et al., cussing the need for ontologies in that domain. Sec- 2017), standardized concepts are crucial to allow data tion 3 brings the ontological basis for the CR. Section be easily interchanged among robots, and services be 4 presents two CR usage scenarios and Section 5 de- unambiguously accessed within the cloud infrastruc- scribes their implementation, based on scenarios that ture. Standardized concept representation can facilit- apply the proposed ontological approach to efficiently ate robot coordination and collaboration by providing share information in the considered CR. Finally, Sec- the basis for the deployment of collective intelligence al- tion 6 concludes the paper. gorithms supported by the cloud. DavinCi (Arumugam et al., 2010) and RoboEarth (Waibel et al., 2011) are well-known efforts towards the provision of cloud-based services to allow data sharing and management among heterogeneous and autonomous multi-robot systems. World's largest tech giants Amazon, Google and IBM 1 https://standards.ieee.org/develop/project/1872. recently released AWS RoboMaker, Google Cloud Ro- 2.html Ontological Concepts for Information Sharing in Cloud Robotics 3 2 Related Work 2018; Yazdani et al., 2018), robots can be seen as service- providers, transparently sharing their resources with 2.1 Cloud Robotics at a Glance other robots. This resource sharing depends on a match between what is being demanded and what are the ro- Cloud Robotics represents a branch of IoT that emerges bots' capabilities to configure and accomplish a service from joining the Cloud Computing (Mell and Grance, that meets the demands. This is particularly useful for 2011) and Networked Robotics (Wang et al., 2015) para- Industry 4.0 wireless networks (Kunst et al., 2019). digms to provide an extended functionality to networked robots and amplify the possibilities of cloud-based sys- tems (Kehoe et al., 2015b). 2.2 Ontologies in the Robotics Domain On one hand, the large storage capacity provided by centralized clouds can help unifying the large volume of An ontology defines a set of ontological elements as rep- information about the environment that robots acquire, resentational primitives to model a domain of know- such as the case in multidrone-based monitoring sys- ledge (Studer et al., 1998)). From this viewpoint, this tems (de Moraes and Pignaton de Freitas, 2020). It can conceptualization includes the types of entities