Reasoning about location of robot-operated object based on probabilistic ontologies

Background: A robot needs to acquire the location of objects when performing daily tasks. Compared to industrial robots, a service robot faces a more complex and unstructured working environment where the location of the target object is usually uncertain. For example, due to diversity in personal habits and seasons, apples may be located in refrigerators, tables, or other places in the living environment. Methods: We propose a novel method for semantic localization of the robot-operated object based on probabilistic ontologies (PR-OWL) and multi-entity Bayesian networks (MEBN). The probabilistic web ontology language is used to describe and model the highly uncertain knowledge about the storage location of objects in the human household environment. Furthermore, the target location is inferred based on the multi-entity Bayesian network. Results: The proposed method is capable to adapting to environmental changes and achieves reliable probability estimation of object location. Experiments on simulated robotic tasks verify the effectiveness of the method. Conclusions: We show that applying PR-OWL combined with MEBN to locate the target object for the robot is feasible， which can improve the cognitive and self-adaptive ability of the robot.