Knowledge Acquisition and Reasoning Systems for Service Robots: A Short Review of the State of the Art

Understanding the environment is an essential capability for mobile service robots to achieve autonomy. While this has proven to be a very challenging task, researchers have come up with a variety of solutions to enable robots to interact with and understand the environment around them. This capability allows robots to make more intelligent decisions using acquired knowledge. In parallel, equipping robots with situation awareness capability is also of equal importance since the semantic context of various entities can change with the change in the situation. This paper aims to deliver a review of the state of the art artificial intelligence approaches taken by researchers to enable robots to acquire and process knowledge of their environment and situation leading to robotic awareness. The focal points include various techniques used for knowledge acquisition, decision management, reasoning, situation awareness, human-robot interaction, and planning. The goal is to compile the modern techniques used in this field based on which future research directions could be defined.