DALI for Cognitive Robotics:Principles and Prototype

Implementation

Giovanni De Gasperis

University of L’Aquila, Italy

RuleML Webinar, 24 February 2017

Big Picture: Smart Cyber-Physical Systems

Cognitive RoboticsQuoting from http://www.ieee-ras.org/cognitive-robotics

Definition" There is growing need for robots that can interactsafely with people in everyday situations. These robotshave to be able to anticipate the effects of their ownactions as well as the actions and needs of the peoplearound them. To achieve this, two streams of researchneed to merge, one concerned with physical systemsspecifically designed to interact with unconstrainedenvironments and another focusing on controlarchitectures that explicitly take into account the need toacquire and use experience. "

Co-Bots: collaborative robotsa robot intended to physically interact with humans in a shared workspace.

Courtesy of respective photo authors

Care Robotsrobots specialized to assist humans at home

Courtesy of respective photo authors

Big Picture: Care Robots

I Interesting ongoing work, e.g., by the group of Prof.Johan Hoorn at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam aboutsocial robotics.

I Concerns not only Artificial Intelligence aspects, butalso the impact of robots on the user from the point ofview of ethics, interaction with the disabled and evenacceptable robot appearance.

I Robots still not fully autonomous, work to do for AI.

I Some of this work is reported in a famousdocumentary “Alice cares”: View

Robot’s Brain: Intelligent Software Agents

I Advantageous to define a robot’s cognitive part as anagent or Multi-Agent System (MAS) defined viadeclarative agent-oriented languages.

I Robot’s tasks: user observation, monitoring andtraining.

I the robot should be equipped with a basic user profiledefining the user’s needs, habits, and preferences;

I the robot should reactively cope with situations;I the robot should proactively take care of the user.

I Some candidate logic-based languages andframeworks: MetateM, 3APL, GOAL, AgentSpeak,Impact, KGP and DALI.

DALIInvented and Developed at the University of L’Aquila, available on GitHub

DALI for Care Robots

DALI for Care Robots: ExamplesUser Profile Available and Updated

Constraint: warning user and/or alerting caregivers

NEVER drink_alchool AND take_medicine.

Care module: reaction, (ranked) preferences

hungry_userE :>{provide_foodA(F ) : food(F ), available_food(F ) :

best_preferred ,healthier}.

Improving the DALI ImplementationSoftware components of the extended DALI

Improving the DALI ImplementationRuntime deployment of the extended DALI architecture

Improving the DALI ImplementationRobotic plugin

We consider (New with respect to the paper) bothI Virtual Robotic platforms andI Real Robots

DALI on top of a virtual robotRobotic plugin

In a virtual robotic simulator (V-REP) the robot is guidedby subsumption architecture of behaviors:

I low level reaction behavior for collision avoidance(V-REP LUA)

I middle layer computer vision behavior for targetsearching (V-REP-LUA)

I top layer cognitive reasoner and commander (Prolog)I glue code for messaging and integration (Python)

DALI on top of a REAL robotRobotic plugin

In a real robotic setup with ROS (Robotic OperativeSystem) the robot is guided by subsumption architectureof behaviors:

I low level reaction behavior for collision avoidance (C)I middle layer computer vision behavior for target

searching (Python+OpenCV)I top layer cognitive reasoner and commander (DALI

with LINDA tuple space)I glue code for messaging and integration (Python with

ROS)

DALI on top of a REAL robotRobotic hardware setup - work in progress

Robotic platform: Turtle Bot 2

I Kobuki motorizedplatform

I RaspberryPI 3with WiFi

I Asus depth stereocamera

Movie time!student’s robotics projects

I learn how to deal with stocastic sensors andactuators

I introduce computer vision in the loop

Cheers from "Intelligent Systems andRobotics Laboratory"@DISIM-UnivAQ

THANK YOU!mailto:giovanni.degasperis@univaq.it