A generic ontology and recovery protocols for Human-Robot Collaboration systems

Humans are considered as integral components of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) systems, not only as object (e.g. in health care), but also as operators and service providers in manufacturing. Sophisticated and complex tasks are to be collaboratively executed by devices (robots) and humans. We introduce a generic ontology for HRC systems. Description of humans is a part of the ontology. Critical and hazardous (for humans) situations, as well as corresponding safeguards are defined on the basis of the ontology. The ontology is an extension of the ontology introduced in Skarzynski et al. (2018) arXiv:1709.03300. The architecture of SO-MRS (see arXiv:1709.03300), a software platform for automatic task accomplishment, is extended to HRC systems. Ongoing experiments, carried out in a simulated HRC system, are to verify the ontology and the architecture.

SO-MRS: a multi-robot system architecture based on the SOA paradigm and ontology

A generic architecture for a class of distributed robotic systems is presented. The architecture supports openness and heterogeneity, i.e. heterogeneous components may be joined and removed from the systems without affecting its basic functionality. The architecture is based on the paradigm of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and a generic representation (ontology) of the environment. A device (e.g. robot) is seen as a collection of its capabilities exposed as services. Generic protocols for publishing, discovering, arranging services are proposed for creating composite services that can accomplish complex tasks in an automatic way. Also generic protocols for execution of composite services are proposed along with simple protocols for monitoring the executions, and for recovery from failures. A software platform built on a multi-robot system (according to the proposed architecture) is a multi-agent system.