OntoSLAM: An Ontology for Representing Location and Simultaneous Mapping Information for Autonomous Robots

Abstract

Autonomous robots are playing an important role to solve the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem in different domains. To generate flexible, intelligent, and interoperable solutions for SLAM, it is a must to model the complex knowledge managed in these scenarios (i.e., robots characteristics and capabilities, maps information, locations of robots and landmarks, etc.) with a standard and formal representation. Some studies have proposed ontologies as the standard representation of such knowledge; however, most of them only cover partial aspects of the information managed by SLAM solutions. In this context, the main contribution of this work is a complete ontology, called OntoSLAM, to model all aspects related to autonomous robots and the SLAM problem, towards the standardization needed in robotics, which is not reached until now with the existing SLAM ontologies. A comparative evaluation of OntoSLAM with state-of-the-art SLAM ontologies is performed, to show how OntoSLAM covers the gaps of the existing SLAM knowledge representation models. Results show the superiority of OntoSLAM at the Domain Knowledge level and similarities with other ontologies at Lexical and Structural levels. Additionally, OntoSLAM is integrated into the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo simulator to test it with Pepper robots and demonstrate its suitability, applicability, and flexibility. Experiments show how OntoSLAM provides semantic benefits to autonomous robots, such as the capability of inferring data from organized knowledge representation, without compromising the information for the application and becoming closer to the standardization needed in robotics.

From SLAM to Situational Awareness: Challenges and Survey

“…However, we saw the current scene graphs used in mobile robotics were insufficient to address complex autonomous tasks, such as multimodal open-set queryable maps for navigation [ 273 , 274 ]. Therefore, starting from the scene graph concept, we introduced the S-Graph as a knowledge graph that emphasized the ability to store the entire representation of the situation, comprising the currently perceived aspects of the scene, their comprehension, the integration with previous records or possibly also external sources from a standardized ontology [ 275 ], and the prediction of the future by the projection of the entities through their models.…”

Semantic Ontologies for Complex Healthcare Structures: A Scoping Review

“…IoT is a crucial point in the ODIN Project, because of the numerous implementations which are based upon, such as medical device real-time management. Cornejo et al [38] present a complete ontology called On-toSLAM, developed to solve Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problems in different domains. Similar issues are also studied by Joo et al [36] in their development of a scalable navigation framework for robots in various environments and scenarios, based on the Triplet Ontological Semantic Model (TOSM).…”