On inferring intentions in shared tasks for industrial collaborative robots

Inferring human operators' actions in shared collaborative tasks, plays a crucial role in enhancing the cognitive capabilities of industrial robots. In all these incipient collaborative robotic applications, humans and robots not only should share space but also forces and the execution of a task. In this article, we present a robotic system which is able to identify different human's intentions and to adapt its behavior consequently, only by means of force data. In order to accomplish this aim, three major contributions are presented: (a) force-based operator's intent recognition, (b) force-based dataset of physical human-robot interaction and (c) validation of the whole system in a scenario inspired by a realistic industrial application. This work is an important step towards a more natural and user-friendly manner of physical human-robot interaction in scenarios where humans and robots collaborate in the accomplishment of a task.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Semantic distances between medical entities

In this thesis, three different similarity measures between medical entities (drugs) have been implemented. Each of those measures have been computed over one or more dimensions of the drugs: textual, taxonomic and molecular information. All the information has been extracted from the same resource, the DrugBank database

Knowledge representation for explainability in collaborative robotics and adaptation

Autonomous robots are going to be used in a large diversity of contexts, interacting and/or collaborating with humans, who will add uncertainty to the collaborations and cause re-planning and adaptations to the execution of robots’ plans. Hence, trustworthy robots must be able to store and retrieve relevant knowledge about their collaborations and adaptations. Furthermore, they shall also use that knowledge to generate explanations for human collaborators. A reasonable approach is first to represent the domain knowledge in triples using an ontology, and then generate natural language explanations from the stored knowledge. In this article, we propose ARE-OCRA, an algorithm that generates explanations about target queries, which are answered by a knowledge base built using an Ontology for Collaborative Robotics and Adaptation (OCRA). The algorithm first queries the knowledge base to retrieve the set of sufficient triples that would answer the queries. Then, it generates the explanation in natural language using the triples. We also present the implementation of the core algorithm’s routine: construct explanation, which generates the explanations from a set of given triples. We consider three different levels of abstraction, being able to generate explanations for different uses and preferences. This is different from most of the literature works that use ontologies, which only provide a single type of explanation. The least abstract level, the set of triples, is intended for ontology experts and debugging, while the second level, aggregated triples, is inspired by other literature baselines. Finally, the third level of abstraction, which combines the triples’ knowledge and the natural language definitions of the ontological terms, is our novel contribution. We showcase the performance of the implementation in a collaborative robotic scenario, showing the generated explanations about the set of OCRA’s competency questions. This work is a step forward to explainable agency in collaborative scenarios where robots adapt their plans.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Visual feedback for humans about robots' perception in collaborative environments

During the last years, major advances on artificial intelligence have successfully allowed robots to perceive their environment, which not only includes static but also dynamic objects such as humans. Indeed, robotic perception is a fundamental feature to achieve safe robots' autonomy in human-robot collaboration. However, in order to have true collaboration, both robots and humans should perceive each other’s intentions and interpret which actions they are performing. In this work, we developed a visual representation tool that illustrates the robot's perception of the space that is shared with a person. Specifically, we adapted an existent system to estimate the human pose, and we created a visualisation tool to represent the robot's perception about the human-robot closeness. We also performed a first evaluation of the system working in realistic conditions using the Tiago robot and a person as a test subject. This work is a first step towards allowing humans to have a better understanding about robots' perception in collaborative scenarios.Peer ReviewedPreprin

OCRA – An ontology for collaborative robotics and adaptation

Industrial collaborative robots will be used in unstructured scenarios and a large variety of tasks in the near future. These robots shall collaborate with humans, who will add uncertainty and safety constraints to the execution of industrial robotic tasks. Hence, trustworthy collaborative robots must be able to reason about their collaboration’s requirements (e.g., safety), as well as the adaptation of their plans due to unexpected situations. A common approach to reasoning is to represent the knowledge of interest using logic-based formalisms, such as ontologies. However, there is not an established ontology defining notions such as collaboration or adaptation yet. In this article, we propose an Ontology for Collaborative Robotics and Adaptation (OCRA), which is built around two main notions: collaboration, and plan adaptation. OCRA ensures a reliable human-robot collaboration, since robots can formalize, and reason about their plan adaptations and collaborations in unstructured collaborative robotic scenarios. Furthermore, our ontology enhances the reusability of the domain’s terminology, allowing robots to represent their knowledge about different collaborative and adaptive situations. We validate our formal model, first, by demonstrating that a robot may answer a set of competency questions using OCRA. Second, by studying the formalization’s performance in limit cases that include instances with incongruent and incomplete axioms. For both validations, the example use case consists in a human and a robot collaborating on the filling of a tray.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Robot explanatory narratives of collaborative and adaptive experiences

© 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksIn the future, robots are expected to autonomously interact and/or collaborate with humans, who will increase the uncertainty during the execution of tasks, provoking online adaptations of robots' plans. Hence, trustworthy robots must be able to store, retrieve and narrate important knowledge about their collaborations and adaptations. In this article, it is proposed a sound methodology that integrates three main elements. First, an ontology for collaborative robotics and adaptation to model the domain knowledge. Second, an episodic memory for time-indexed knowledge storage and retrieval. Third, a novel algorithm to extract the relevant knowledge and generate textual explanatory narratives. The algorithm produces three different types of outputs, varying the specificity, for diverse uses and preferences. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of the narratives, obtaining promising results. Finally, we discuss how the methodology can be generalized to other ontologies and experiences. This work boosts robot explainability, especially in cases where robots need to narrate the details of their short and long-term past experiences.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Ontologies for Industry 4.0

The current fourth industrial revolution, or ‘Industry 4.0’ (I4.0), is driven by digital data, connectivity, and cyber systems, and it has the potential to create impressive/new business opportunities. With the arrival of I4.0, the scenario of various intelligent systems interacting reliably and securely with each other becomes a reality which technical systems need to address. One major aspect of I4.0 is to adopt a coherent approach for the semantic communication in between multiple intelligent systems, which include human and artificial (software or hardware) agents. For this purpose, ontologies can provide the solution by formalizing the smart manufacturing knowledge in an interoperable way. Hence, this paper presents the few existing ontologies for I4.0, along with the current state of the standardization effort in the factory 4.0 domain and examples of real-world scenarios for I4.0.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A review and comparison of ontology-based approaches to robot autonomy

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of reuse, there needs to be an agreement on the meaning of terms. A common approach is to represent these terms using ontology languages that conceptualize the respective domain. In this work, we will review projects that use ontologies to support robot autonomy. We will systematically search for projects that fulfill a set of inclusion criteria and compare them with each other with respect to the scope of their ontology, what types of cognitive capabilities are supported by the use of ontologies, and which is their application domain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Semantic distances between medical entities

In this thesis, three different similarity measures between medical entities (drugs) have been implemented. Each of those measures have been computed over one or more dimensions of the drugs: textual, taxonomic and molecular information. All the information has been extracted from the same resource, the DrugBank database

On inferring intentions in shared tasks for industrial collaborative robots

Inferring human operators’ actions in shared collaborative tasks plays a crucial role in enhancing the cognitive capabilities of industrial robots. In all these incipient collaborative robotic applications, humans and robots not only should share space, but also forces and the execution of a task. In this article, we present a robotic system that is able to identify different human’s intentions and to adapt its behavior consequently, only employing force data. In order to accomplish this aim, three major contributions are presented: (a) a force based operator’s intention recognition system based on data from only two users; (b) a force based dataset of physical human–robot interaction; and (c) validation of the whole system with 15 people in a scenario inspired by a realistic industrial application. This work is an important step towards a more natural and user-friendly manner of physical human–robot interaction in scenarios where humans and robots collaborate in the accomplishment of a task.This work is supported by the Regional Catalan Agency ACCIÓthrough the RIS3CAT2016 project SIMBIOTS(COMRDI16-1-0017) and the Spanish State Research Agency through the María de Maeztu Seal of Excellence to IRI (Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial)(MDM-2016-0656) and the HuMoUR project TIN2017-90086-R (AEI/FEDER, UE)