Proceedings of the 1st Standardized Knowledge Representation and Ontologies for Robotics and Automation Workshop

Welcome to IEEE-ORA (Ontologies for Robotics and Automation) IROS workshop. This is the 1st edition of the workshop on! Standardized Knowledge Representation and Ontologies for Robotics and Automation. The IEEE-ORA 2014 workshop was held on the 18th September, 2014 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. In!the IEEE-ORA IROS workshop, 10 contributions were presented from 7 countries in North and South America, Asia and Europe. The presentations took place in the afternoon, from 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM. The first session was dedicated to “Standards for Knowledge Representation in Robotics”, where presentations were made from the IEEE working group standards for robotics and automation, and also from the ISO TC 184/SC2/WH7. The second session was dedicated to “Core and Application Ontologies”, where presentations were made for core robotics ontologies, and also for industrial and robot assisted surgery ontologies. Three posters were presented in emergent applications of ontologies in robotics. We would like to express our thanks to all participants. First of all to the authors, whose quality work is the essence of this workshop. Next, to all the members of the international program committee, who helped us with their expertise and valuable time. We would also like to deeply thank the IEEE-IROS 2014 organizers for hosting this workshop. Our deep gratitude goes to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, that sponsors! the IEEE-ORA group activities, and also to the scientific organizations that kindly agreed to sponsor all the workshop authors work

Robot ontologies for sensor- and Image-guided surgery

Robots and robotics are becoming more com- plex and flexible, due to technological advancement, improved sensing capabilities and machine intelligence. Service robots target a wide range of applications, relying on advanced Human–Robot Interaction. Medical robotics is becoming a leading application area within, and the number of surgical, rehabilitation and hospital assistance robots is rising rapidly. However, the complexity of the medical environment has been a major barrier, preventing a wider use of robotic technology, thus mostly teleoperated, human-in-the-loop control solutions emerged so far. Providing smarter and better medical robots requires a systematic approach in describing and translating human processes for the robots. It is believed that ontologies can bridge human cognitive understanding and robotic reasoning (machine intelligence). Besides, ontologies serve as a tool and method to assess the added value robotic technology brings into the medical environment. The purpose of this paper is to identify relevant ontology research in medical robotics, and to review the state-of-the art. It focuses on the surgical domain, fundamental terminology and interactions are described for two example applications in neurosurgery and orthopaedics

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: a survey

The demographic change towards an aging population is creating a significant impact and introducing drastic challenges to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for a time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to impaired seniors. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL

Semantic Ontologies for Complex Healthcare Structures: A Scoping Review

The healthcare environment is made up of highly complicated interactions between many technologies, activities, and people. Ensuring a solid communication between them is vital to ease the healthcare management. Semantic ontologies are knowledge representation tools that implement abstractions to fully describe a given topic in terms of subjects and relations. This scoping review aims to identify and analyse available ontologies which can depict all the available use-cases that describe the hospital environment in relation to the European project ODIN and its future expansion. The review has been conducted on the Scopus database on January 13th, 2023 using the PRISMA extensions for scoping reviews. Two reviewers screened 3,225 documents emerged from the database search. Further filtering led to a final set of 32 articles to be analysed for the results. A set of 34 ontologies extracted by the identified articles has been analysed and discussed as well. The results of this study will lead to the implementation of a common integrated ontology which could hold information about healthcare entities as well as their semantic relationships, strengthen data exchange and interconnections among people, devices and applications in an expanded scenario which include Internet of Things, robots and Artificial Intelligence

Autonomous task planning and situation awareness in robotic surgery

The use of robots in minimally invasive surgery has improved the quality of standard surgical procedures. So far, only the automation of simple surgical actions has been investigated by researchers, while the execution of structured tasks requiring reasoning on the environment and the choice among multiple actions is still managed by human surgeons. In this paper, we propose a framework to implement surgical task automation. The framework consists of a task-level reasoning module based on answer set programming, a low-level motion planning module based on dynamic movement primitives, and a situation awareness module. The logic-based reasoning module generates explainable plans and is able to recover from failure conditions, which are identified and explained by the situation awareness module interfacing to a human supervisor, for enhanced safety. Dynamic Movement Primitives allow to replicate the dexterity of surgeons and to adapt to obstacles and changes in the environment. The framework is validated on different versions of the standard surgical training peg-and-ring task.Comment: Submitted to IROS 2020 conferenc

Procedural-Reasoning Architecture for Applied Behavior Analysis-based Instructions

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental disability affecting as many as 1 in every 88 children. While there is no known cure for ASD, there are known behavioral and developmental interventions, based on demonstrated efficacy, that have become the predominant treatments for improving social, adaptive, and behavioral functions in children. Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA)-based early childhood interventions are evidence based, efficacious therapies for autism that are widely recognized as effective approaches to remediation of the symptoms of ASD. They are, however, labor intensive and consequently often inaccessible at the recommended levels. Recent advancements in socially assistive robotics and applications of virtual intelligent agents have shown that children with ASD accept intelligent agents as effective and often preferred substitutes for human therapists. This research is nascent and highly experimental with no unifying, interdisciplinary, and integral approach to development of intelligent agents based therapies, especially not in the area of behavioral interventions. Motivated by the absence of the unifying framework, we developed a conceptual procedural-reasoning agent architecture (PRA-ABA) that, we propose, could serve as a foundation for ABA-based assistive technologies involving virtual, mixed or embodied agents, including robots. This architecture and related research presented in this disser- tation encompass two main areas: (a) knowledge representation and computational model of the behavioral aspects of ABA as applicable to autism intervention practices, and (b) abstract architecture for multi-modal, agent-mediated implementation of these practices