Semantic Robots

Project website

There is a world-wide growing trend to introduce semantic information into robotic systems. This is evident in areas such as robot vision and mapping, human-robot interaction, and the use of ontologies for modelling of robot actions and perception. These efforts share many common research questions and issues, but work in each area is pursued in isolation and without being aware of the related achievements in the other areas. As a consequence, research and industrial applications on the intersection of robotics and semantic systems are in their embryonic stage worldwide and are underrepresented in Sweden.

Building upon our internationally recognized research in robot vision, rich 3D mapping, techniques for higher-level perception and task planning, we have initiated a research effort towards the unified development of Semantic Robots: such a robot uses a multi-semantic model of its environment that can be tailored to its action and perception capabilities in order to automatically derive and execute action plans that achieve given goals. This is a 6-year effort (2014-2020) which is funded by the KK Foundation with a total of 36 MSEK and matched to the same amount by contributions from our industrial partners.

Our overall objective is creating sustainable world-class research in semantic robots which is anchored in a strong industrial base.  Consequently, our 6-year mission arches over two major components:

• Achieving research excellence by integrating our internationally recognised research in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence to address few carefully selected and closely related topics in the emerging field of semantic robots: Semantic Perception, 3D world Modelling for Action and Multi-semantic planning.
• Strengthening the Swedish industrial competence/competitiveness in the consumer, civil and commercial robot markets via a research agenda that addresses major technology needs and the implementation of research results in industrial platforms and scenarios. This will be achieved in co-production with the profile’s industrial partners, Atlas Copco, Volvo CE, Kollmorgen Automation AB, Husqvarna, SAAB Dynamics, Cnet, Optronic and Hothouse. The first three companies have pioneered the commercialisation of autonomous machines technology in Sweden. AASS has been part of this pioneering effort via KKS projects based on co-production with these companies. The rest of the companies are leading in their areas and convinced that work on semantic robots will facilitate new technology advances and increased market share.