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Reasoning with Qualitative Positional Information for Domestic Domains in the Situation Calculus

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a thorough integration of qualitative representations and reasoning for positional information for domestic service robotics domains into our high-level robot control. In domestic settings for service robots like in the RoboCup@Home competitions, complex tasks such as “get the cup from the kitchen and bring it to the living room” or “find me this and that object in the apartment” have to be accomplished. At these competitions the robots may only be instructed by natural language. As humans use qualitative concepts such as “near” or “far”, the robot needs to cope with them, too. For our domestic robot, we use the robot programming and plan language Readylog, our variant of Golog. In previous work we extended the action language Golog, which was developed for the high-level control of agents and robots, with fuzzy set-based qualitative concepts. We now extend our framework to positional fuzzy fluents with an associated positional context called frames. With that and our underlying reasoning mechanism we can transform qualitative positional information from one context to another to account for changes in context such as the point of view or the scale. We demonstrate how qualitative positional fluents based on a fuzzy set semantics can be deployed in domestic domains and showcase how reasoning with these qualitative notions can seamlessly be applied to a fetch-and-carry task in a RoboCup@Home scenario.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Knowledge-based Systems Group, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Stefan Schiffer, Alexander Ferrein & Gerhard Lakemeyer

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  1. Stefan Schiffer
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  2. Alexander Ferrein
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  3. Gerhard Lakemeyer
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Correspondence to Stefan Schiffer.

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Part of the work was conducted while A. Ferrein was affiliated with the Robotics and Agents Research Lab at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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Schiffer, S., Ferrein, A. & Lakemeyer, G. Reasoning with Qualitative Positional Information for Domestic Domains in the Situation Calculus. J Intell Robot Syst 66, 273–300 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-011-9606-0

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