Can I do it

TL;DR

This paper presents a knowledge representation framework combining ontologies and reasoning methods to enable robots to assess their task capabilities based on up-to-date performance data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated knowledge structure that combines ontologies with deductive and inductive reasoning for robot capability assessment.

Findings

Robot can answer capability questions accurately.

Knowledge base updates with new performance data.

Framework applicable in real-world scenarios.

Abstract

Knowledge about how well a robot can perform a specific task is currently present only in engineering reports which are inaccessible to the robot. Artificial Intelligence techniques, such as hypergraphs and automated reasoning, can provide such engineering knowledge online while enabling updates in the knowledge with new experiences. This requires a sound knowledge structure and maintenance routines for keeping this knowledge-base about the robot's capabilities truthful. A robot with such up-to-date information can reason about if and how well it can accomplish a task. This article introduces a knowledge representation that combines an ontology on system engineering, a deductive reasoning on the connections between system components, and an inductive reasoning on the performance of these components in the current system configuration. This representation is further used to derive the expected performance for the overall system based on a continuous evaluation of the actual performance per component. Our real-life implementation shows a robot that can answer questions on whether it can do a specific task with the desired performance.