An Ontology of Robotics Science

Abstract

This paper describes ground-breaking work on the creation of an ontology for the domain of robotics as a science. An ontology is a collection of terms, concepts and their inter-relationships, represented in a machine-usable form. An ontology in a particular domain is useful if the structure it adds to the domain is simple enough to be understood quickly and intuitively, and rich enough to increase insight into the whole domain to a level where this increased insight can lead to innovation and increased efficiency in scientific and practical developments.

This paper presents an ontology for the science of robotics, and not for robots as objects: the latter ontology describes the physical and technical semantics and properties of individual robots and robot components, while the ontology of the science of robotics encodes the semantics of the meta-level concepts and domains of robotics. For example, surgical robotics and industrial automation are two concepts in the ontology of the science of robotics, while the semantics of robot kinematics and dynamics, or of a particular robot control algorithm belong to the ontology of robots as objects.

The structure in the presented ontology for the science of robotics consists of two complementary sub-structures: (i) the robot agent and robot system models (i.e., what components are required in a robot device, and in a robotic application, respectively), and (ii) the Context Space (i.e., ordinal and categorical relationships between physical and computational aspects of robot agents and systems in which the sub-domains of robotics can be mapped out). The implementation of the Context Space concept using standard ontology tools is explained. The paper illustrates its expected usefulness with examples of sub-domains of robotics expressed as contexts in the context space, and with two use cases for the ontology: (i) the classification of conference or journal paper submissions, and (ii) the guidance of new researchers into the domain of robotics.