Semantic Spatial Representation: a unique representation of an environment based on an ontology for robotic applications

Abstract

It is important, for human-robot interaction, to endow the robot with the knowledge necessary to understand human needs and to be able to respond to them. We present a formalized and unified representation for indoor environments using an ontology devised for a route description task in which a robot must provide explanations to a person. We show that this representation can be used to choose a route to explain to a human as well as to verbalize it using a route perspective. Based on ontology, this representation has a strong possibility of evolution to adapt to many other applications. With it, we get the semantics of the environment elements while keeping a description of the known connectivity of the environment. This representation and the illustration algorithms, to find and verbalize a route, have been tested in two environments of different scales.