3rd International Workshop on the Applications of Knowledge Representation and Semantic Technologies in Robotics (AnSWeR19)

Abstract

Autonomous mobile agents and robotics in general are experiencing a growing interest due to a number of factors, e.g. the advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision; the amount of new efficient techniques for basic robotic tasks (perception, manipulation, navigation etc.); and the increasing number of cost-accessible robotic platforms in the market. As a consequence, robots will be required to achieve more and more complex tasks, hence exposing the ability to deal with different sources of knowledge about the world in order to improve their behaviors. While the problem of enabling robots to use available sources of heterogeneous knowledge has attracted attention relatively recently in the robotics community (e.g. the RoboEarth or RoboBrain projects), the Knowledge Representation and Semantic Web communities have been studying techniques to model, integrate and exploit heterogeneous sources knowledge for a long time. We argue that such techniques should also have a role to play in the context of robotic applications, as they could be beneficial for robots to achieve their tasks. The goal It is therefore important to understand how these communities are interfacing, and how they can benefit from each others. The goal of the AnSWeR workshop is to address these issues by studying the involvement and applications of Knowledge Representation formalisms and semantic technologies in robotic applications, by giving the researchers and practitioners the opportunity to compare and debate on common problems. AnSWeR will therefore allow addressing and debating on problems that have been tackled so far by two communities that worked on overlapping topics. The first two editions of AnSWeR were held in 2017 and 2018 in Semantic Web conferences to investigate the interests in establishing synergies between both sides. An exciting dialogue between roboticists and knowledge representation practitioners was triggered, encouraging us to maintain and evolve the conversation. We turn this time towards the robotics community and aim at running the third edition of AnSWeR at IROS2019 to strengthen the dialogue and engage a new, wider audience, bridging the gap between these overlapping, but complementary communities. We also firmly believe that by hosting AnSWeR at IROS2019, we will be able to forster conversations among the Asian community, that put profound efforts into the robotics research, and the EU audience, which presents a long-standing tradition in knowledge management and representation.