A Suite of Ontologies for Robotics and Automation | NIST

8 • IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE • MARCH 2017 One of the basic requirements for any type of robot com­ munication, whether with other robots or humans, is the need for a common vocabulary along with clear and concise definitions. With the growing complexity of tasks that robots are expected to perform as well as the need for multirobot and human–robot collaboration, the need for a standard and well­defined knowl edge representation is becom­ ing more evident. The IEEE Standard Association’s Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) recognized this need, and, in 2011, created the Ontologies for Rob ot ics and Automation (ORA) working group. The goal of the group is to develop a standard to pro­ vide an overall ontology and associated me ­ th odology for knowl edge rep­ resentation and reasoning in ro ­ botics and auto­ mation to gether with the representation of concepts in an initial set of application domains. The standard provides a unified way of representing knowledge and provides a common set of terms and definitions, allowing for unambiguous knowledge transfer among any group of human, robots, and other artificial systems. The group grew quickly; it is now com­ posed of 175 members representing 23 countries from a mixture of approxi­ mately 50% educational institutions, 25% private companies, and 25% gov­ ernment entities. One of the main outputs of this group is the IEEE Standard Ontologies for Robotics and Automation, which is composed of a core ontology called Core Ontologies for Robotics and Auto­ mation (CORA) [4]. This standard specifies the main, most general con­ cepts, relations, and axioms of robotics and automation (R&A), and serves as a reference for knowledge representation and reasoning in robots as well as a for­ mal reference vocabulary for communi­ cating knowledge about R&A between robots and humans. This standard was awarded the prestigious Emerging Technology Award by the IEEE Stan­ dards Association in December 2015. The standard was also mentioned in the National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research and Development Strategic Plan, released by President Obama in October 2016 [5]. This strategic plan focuses on the role of AI, machine learning, automation, and robotics in addressing complex national problems. With the release of this standard, the CORA working group completed its task and was required to disband. How­ ever, many of the working group mem­ bers remain involved in this work by focusing on subgroups. CORA aims to describe what a robot is and how it relates to other concepts. It defines four big broad entities: robot part, robot, complex robot, and robotic system. The term robot may have as many definitions as there are authors writing about the subject. The inherent ambiguity in this term might be an issue when one needs to specify an ontology for a broad community like ours. We acknowledge this ambiguity as an intrinsic feature of the domain and, therefore, we decided to elaborate a def­ inition based purely on necessary con­ ditions without specifying sufficient conditions. Thus, CORA covers all enti­ ties that the community considers as a robot, at the cost of classifying some entities as robots that may be counterin­ tuitive to some roboticists. However, the concepts in our ontology could be specialized according to the needs of specific subdomains or applications of R&A. CORA was developed to be a high­ level standard on which domain­ specific efforts could build. The approach was to define concepts in CORA that were generic to all robot domains, and then these domains could specialize these concepts to address their specific infor­ mation requirements. When the work­ ing group that developed CORA was created, based on the interests of the working group members, we expected subgroups to emerge that would spe­ cialize the concepts represented in CORA. Currently, we expect that groups will be organized in two layers (Figure 1). We expect that middle­ layer groups will develop ontologies Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2016. 2645444 Date of publication: 29 March 2017 A Suite of Ontologies for Robotics and Automation