CAN UNCLASSIFIED Requirements for building an ontology for autonomous robots Behzad Bayat, Julita Bermejo-Alonso, Joel Carbonera, Tullio Facchinetti, Sandro Fiorini, Paulo Goncalves,Vitor A.M. Jorge, Maki Habib, Alaa Khamis, Kamilo Melo, Bao Nguyen, Joanna Isabelle Olszewska, Liam Paull, Edson Prestes, Veera Ragavan, Sajad Saeedi, Ricardo Sanz, Mae Seto, Bruce Spencer, Amirkhosro Vosughi and Howard Li Industrial Robot Journal Volume 43 Issue 5 of Industrial Robot: An International Journal Date of Publication from Ext Publisher: April 2016 Defence Research and Development Canada External Literature (P) DRDC-RDDC-2019-P059 March 2019 CAN UNCLASSIFIED CAN UNCLASSIFIED IMPORTANT INFORMATIVE STATEMENTS This document was reviewed for Controlled Goods by Defence Research and Development Canada using the Schedule to the Defence Production Act. Disclaimer: This document is not published by the Editorial Office of Defence Research and Development Canada, an agency of the Department of National Defence of Canada but is to be catalogued in the Canadian Defence Information System (CANDIS), the national repository for Defence S&T documents. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada (Department of National Defence) makes no representations or warranties, expressed or implied, of any kind whatsoever, and assumes no liability for the accuracy, reliability, completeness, currency or usefulness of any information, product, process or material included in this document. Nothing in this document should be interpreted as an endorsement for the specific use of any tool, technique or process examined in it. Any reliance on, or use of, any information, product, process or material included in this document is at the sole risk of the person so using it or relying on it. Canada does not assume any liability in respect of any damages or losses arising out of or in connection with the use of, or reliance on, any information, product, process or material included in this document. Template in use: EO Publishing App for CR-EL Eng 2019-01-03-v1 © Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada (Department of National Defence), 2016 © Sa Majesté la Reine en droit du Canada (Ministère de la Défense nationale), 2016 CAN UNCLASSIFIED Requirements for building an ontology for autonomous robots Behzad Bayat, Julita Bermejo-Alonso, Joel Carbonera, Tullio Facchinetti, Sandro Fiorini, Paulo Goncalves, Vitor A.M. Jorge, Maki Habib, Alaa Khamis, Kamilo Melo, Bao Nguyen, Joanna Isabelle Olszewska, Liam Paull, Edson Prestes, Veera Ragavan, Sajad Saeedi, Ricardo Sanz, Mae Seto, Bruce Spencer, Amirkhosro Vosughi and Howard Li (Author affiliations can be found at the end of the article) Abstract Purpose – IEEE Ontologies for Robotics and Automation Working Group were divided into subgroups that were in charge of studying industrial robotics, service robotics and autonomous robotics. This paper aims to present the work in-progress developed by the autonomous robotics (AuR) subgroup. This group aims to extend the core ontology for robotics and automation to represent more specific concepts and axioms that are commonly used in autonomous robots. Design/methodology/approach – For autonomous robots, various concepts for aerial robots, underwater robots and ground robots are described. Components of an autonomous system are defined, such as robotic platforms, actuators, sensors, control, state estimation, path planning, perception and decision-making. Findings – AuR has identified the core concepts and domains needed to create an ontology for autonomous robots. Practical implications – AuR targets to create a standard ontology to represent the knowledge and reasoning needed to create autonomous systems that comprise robots that can operate in the air, ground and underwater environments. The concepts in the developed ontology will endow a robot with autonomy, that is, endow robots with the ability to perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous explicit human guidance. Originality/value – Creating a standard for knowledge representation and reasoning in autonomous robotics will have a significant impact on all R&A domains, such as on the knowledge transmission among agents, including autonomous robots and humans. This tends to facilitate the communication among them and also provide reasoning capabilities involving the knowledge of all elements using the ontology. This will result in improved autonomy of autonomous systems. The autonomy will have considerable impact on how robots interact with humans. As a result, the use of robots will further benefit our society. Many tedious tasks that currently can only be performed by humans will be performed by robots, which will further improve the quality of life. To the best of the authors’knowledge, AuR is the first group that adopts a systematic approach to develop ontologies consisting of specific concepts and axioms that are commonly used in autonomous robots. Keywords Ontology, Autonomous robots Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction IEEE ORA WG started as a study group in early 2011 and became an official working group in November 2011. It In the beginning of 2015, the IEEE-RAS Ontologies for comprised several members from a cross-section of industry, Robotics and Automation Working Group (IEEE ORA WG) academia and government that represent over 20 countries. published the IEEE 1872-2015 standard, the first-ever Since the beginning, IEEE ORA WG was divided into standard elaborated by the IEEE Robotics and Automation different subgroups which were each in charge of studying a Society. This standard defines a set of ontologies related to specific R&A subdomain, such as industrial robotics, service robotics and automation (R&A), chief among those being the core ontology for robotics and automation (CORA), which specifies the main and most general concepts and axioms that permeate the R&A domain. Because of the importance of this This work was partly supported by CAPES and CNPq, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), New Brunswick achievement, in December 2015, IEEE ORA WG was the Innovation Foundation (NBIF) and by FCT, through IDMEC, under recipient of the Emerging Technology Award, a prize given LAETA, project UID/EMS/50022/2013. annually by the IEEE Standards Association[1]. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of their organizations. The reviewers’ comments are greatly appreciated. Our The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on thanks must also go to Francesco Amigoni, Emilio Miguelanez, Craig Schlenoff, Raj Madhavan and other members of the IEEE RAS ontologies Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0143-991X.htm for robotics and automation working group: Gaetan Severac, Guilherme Raffo, Julian Angle, Aleksandar Stefanovski, Phillip J Durst and Wendell Gray’s for their contributions to the initial work presented at IEEE IROS. Industrial Robot: An International Journal Received 1 February 2016 43/5 (2016) 469–480 Revised 21 March 2016 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0143-991X] 10 April 2016 [DOI 10.1108/IR-02-2016-0059] Accepted 22 April 2016 469 Autonomous robots Industrial Robot: An International Journal Behzad Bayat et al. Volume 43 · Number 5 · 2016 · 469–480 robotics and autonomous robotics (AuR) (Paull et al., 2012). vocabulary used in problem-solving and communications for Even having all these subgroups, all efforts were concentrated such heterogeneous autonomous systems. in the CORA development. Currently, after reaching this big Previous approaches used to represent knowledge for R&A step, these subgroups are focusing their activities in their using ontologies include works related to navigation (Bateman respective subdomains. and Farrar, 2005), workspaces (Krieg-Brückner et al., 2005), Nowadays, AuR is elaborating a petition that will be knowledge representation and action generation (MacMahon submitted to the IEEE RAS Standing Committee for et al., 2006; Coradeschi and Saffiotti, 2001), route instruction Standards Activities to officialize its activities. This initial (Lauria et al., 2002) and data representation (Soldatova et al., petition is a solicitation to officialize AuR as a study group 2006). Regarding specifically multi-agent systems (MASs), and, according to the group progress, another petition will be ontologies are already being used in such projects as Robot submitted to the same committee to officialize AuR as an Earth European project (Waibel et al., 2011), Proteus project official working group, following the same steps of its parent (Lortal et al., 2011), SWAMO NASA project (Witt et al., group, IEEE ORA WG. These steps are necessary and 2008), A3ME (Herzog et al., 2008), and so on. required to conduct the development of any standard These studies are very interesting and have represented a sponsored by IEEE RAS. This paper presents the work starting point for our work, but these ontologies are at a in-progress developed by one of these subgroups called AuR. lower level of knowledge representation. They focus more This group aims to extend the CORA to represent more on the description of the capacities of mobile agents than on specific concepts and axioms that are commonly used in AuR. the high-level service representation for autonomous agents Therefore, AuR is performing a wide study in different R&A as we aim to do. In our work, we are focusing on specifying domains (e.g. flying robots, mobile robots, field robots and the knowledge from each of the subjects or specific fields marine systems) to identify the