Using Ontology as a Strategy for Modeling the Interface Between the Cognitive and Robotic Systems

This work contributes to the social robotics area by defining an architecture, called Cognitive Model Development Environment (CMDE) that models the interaction between cognitive and robotic systems. The communication between these systems is formalized with the definition of an ontology, called OntPercept, that models the perception of the environment using the information captured by the sensors present in the robotic system. The formalization offered by the OntPercept ontology simplifies the development, reproduction and comparison of experiments. The validation of the results required the development of two additional components. The first, called Robot House Simulator (RHS), provides an environment where robot and human can interact socially with increasing levels of cognitive processing. The second component is represented by the cognitive system that models the behavior of the robot with the support of artificial intelligence based systems.