Toward robot-agnostic home appliance operation: a task execution framework using motion primitives, ontology, and GUI

摘要

Since home appliances support various human activities in the household, service robots are expected to also use home appliances to perform the same tasks. We assume that most home appliances consist of a rigid cabinet with a few operating parts. Hence, our research question is if each service robot has its own set of motion primitives to handle each operating part, the robots can use common knowledge to perform those operations. In this paper, we propose a task execution framework for robot-agnostic home appliance operations. The proposed framework consists of three aspects. First, we provide a set of the minimum required motion primitives to handle operating parts to each robot arm. Second, we use ontology to represent knowledge of how to operate home appliances. Third, we provide a graphical user interface (GUI) to construct and edit an ontology. In the experiments, we verified the applicability of the proposed framework with three types of conditions: (1) a simulation and/or a real environment, (2) a few types of home appliances, and (3) three types of robot arms. Furthermore, through these experiments, we also verified that the proposed framework could execute a sequential task to operate home appliances.