KANT: A tool for Grounding and Knowledge Management

TL;DR

KANT is an open-source tool designed to facilitate seamless interaction between symbolic and subsymbolic knowledge components in robotic systems, improving knowledge management performance within ROS middleware.

Contribution

This paper introduces KANT, a novel software tool that enables flexible querying and management of knowledge bases across different data representations in robotics.

Findings

KANT improves knowledge management efficiency in ROS.

The tool supports querying, editing, and deleting knowledge data.

Evaluation shows enhanced performance using in-memory and non-SQL databases.

Abstract

The intelligent robotics community usually organizes knowledge into symbolic and sub-symbolic levels. These two levels establish the set of symbols and rules for manipulating knowledge based on their (symbol system - dictionary). Thus, the correspondences -- Grounding or knowledge representation -- require specific software techniques for anchoring continuous and discrete state variables between these two levels. This paper presents the design and evaluation of an Open Source tool called KANT(Knowledge mAnagemeNT) to let different components of the system architecture controlling the robot query, save, edit, and delete the data from the Knowledge Base without having to worry about the type and the implementation of the source data. Using KANT, components managing subsymbolic information can smoothly interact with symbolic components. Besides, implementation mechanisms used in KANT, such as the use of in-memory and non-SQL databases, improve the performance of the knowledge management systems in ROS middleware, as shown by the evaluations presented in this work.