Abstract

Autonomous service robots will have to understand vaguely described tasks, such as “set the table” or “clean up”. Performing such tasks as intended requires robots to fully, precisely, and appropriately parameterize their low-level control programs. We propose knowledge processing as a computational resource for enabling robots to bridge the gap between vague task descriptions and the detailed information needed to actually perform those tasks in the intended way. In this article, we introduce the KnowRob knowledge processing system that is specifically designed to provide autonomous robots with the knowledge needed for performing everyday manipulation tasks. The system allows the realization of “virtual knowledge bases”: collections of knowledge pieces that are not explicitly represented but computed on demand from the robot’s internal data structures, its perception system, or external sources of information. This article gives an overview of the different kinds of knowledge, the different inference mechanisms, and interfaces for acquiring knowledge from external sources, such as the robot’s perception system, observations of human activities, Web sites on the Internet, as well as Web-based knowledge bases for information exchange between robots. We evaluate the system’s scalability and present different integrated experiments that show its versatility and comprehensiveness.