Ontology Generation Using GUI and Simulation for Service Robots to Operate Home Appliances

Abstract

In a home environment, operating home appliances is very common but this is a difficult task for robots because home appliances have the various functions. In our previous work, Garcia et al. [1] proposed to use the ontology for representing the knowledge to operate home appliances. This work is just a proof-of-concept, since the size of the ontology and the number of the home appliances that the robot can operate are very limited. In this paper, we propose a framework to assist with the generation of the ontology to expand the previous system. For this purpose, we provide a graphical user interface to generate the ontology and the simulation environment to verify the consistency of the system. First, we verify the proposed framework by actually generating the ontology and then operating a microwave oven using an actual humanoid service robot, Pepper. Next, we verify the framework by generating more complicated ontology and operating the simulated robot, Pepper. We set up the simulation environment of the whole kitchen including virtual microwave oven and washing machine.