A Helping Hand: Industrial Robotics, Knowledge and User-Oriented Services

In this paper we discuss AI in industrial robotics. In automatic control, computer vision and optimization, ma- chine learning and data mining algorithms are widely used. However, cognition enabling mechanisms, such as high-level logic and symbolic reasoning, are still limited. This is not due to the lack of available algorithms, rather the bottleneck is knowledge representation, acquisition and transformation between different formalisms. In industrial robotics, cognition is not self-serving, AI tech- nologies are rather a tool to make the user interaction, the system configuration and the task execution as cost efficient as possible. Autonomy is a mean to minimize the human workload. In our approach, we use an online knowledge base that provides libraries with object models and task specifications, and offer services to support the user (and the robot) during programming, deployment and execution