Mihai Pomarlan

Giang Hoang Nguyen, Daniel Bessler, Simon Stelter et al.

Robots performing human-scale manipulation tasks require an extensive amount of knowledge about their surroundings in order to perform their actions competently and human-like. In this work, we investigate the use of virtual reality technology as an implementation for robot environment modeling, and present a technique for translating scene graphs into knowledge bases. To this end, we take advantage of the Universal Scene Description (USD) format which is an emerging standard for the authoring, visualization and simulation of complex environments. We investigate the conversion of USD-based environment models into Knowledge Graph (KG) representations that facilitate semantic querying and integration with additional knowledge sources.

Stefan Morar, Adrian Groza, Mihai Pomarlan

We present a method for formalising quantifiers in natural language in the context of human-robot interactions. The solution is based on first-order logic extended with capabilities to represent the cardinality of variables, operating similarly to generalised quantifiers. To demonstrate the method, we designed an end-to-end system able to receive input as natural language, convert it into a formal logical representation, evaluate it, and return a result or send a command to a simulated robot.

Darius Has, Adrian Groza, Mihai Pomarlan

We propose a solution for handling abort commands given to robots. The solution is exemplified with a running scenario with household kitchen robots. The robot uses planning to find sequences of actions that must be performed in order to gracefully cancel a previously received command. The Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) is used to write a domain to model kitchen activities and behaviours, and this domain is enriched with knowledge from online ontologies and knowledge graphs, like DBPedia. We discuss the results obtained in different scenarios.

Daniel Beßler, Robert Porzel, Mihai Pomarlan et al.

In this paper, we present foundations of the Socio-physical Model of Activities (SOMA). SOMA represents both the physical as well as the social context of everyday activities. Such tasks seem to be trivial for humans, however, they pose severe problems for artificial agents. For starters, a natural language command requesting something will leave many pieces of information necessary for performing the task unspecified. Humans can solve such problems fast as we reduce the search space by recourse to prior knowledge such as a connected collection of plans that describe how certain goals can be achieved at various levels of abstraction. Rather than enumerating fine-grained physical contexts SOMA sets out to include socially constructed knowledge about the functions of actions to achieve a variety of goals or the roles objects can play in a given situation. As the human cognition system is capable of generalizing experiences into abstract knowledge pieces applicable to novel situations, we argue that both physical and social context need be modeled to tackle these challenges in a general manner. This is represented by the link between the physical and social context in SOMA where relationships are established between occurrences and generalizations of them, which has been demonstrated in several use cases that validate SOMA.