A survey of semantic reasoning frameworks for robotic systems

Weiyu Liu, Angel Daruna, Maithili Patel, Kartik Ramachandruni, Sonia Chernova

Abstract: Robots are increasingly transitioning from specialized, single-task machines to general-purpose systems that operate in diverse and dynamic environments. To address the challenges associated with operation in real-world domains, robots must effectively generalize knowledge, learn, and be transparent in their decision making. This survey examines Semantic Reasoning techniques for robotic systems, which enable robots to encode and use semantic knowledge, including concepts, facts, ideas, and beliefs about the world. Continually perceiving, understanding, and generalizing semantic knowledge allows a robot to identify the meaningful patterns shared between problems and environments, and therefore more effectively perform a wide range of real-world tasks. We identify the three common components that make up a computational Semantic Reasoning Framework: knowledge sources, computational frameworks, and world representations. We analyze the existing implementations and the key characteristics of these components, highlight the many interactions that occur between them, and examine their integration for solving robotic tasks related to five aspects of the world, including objects, spaces, agents, tasks, and actions. By analyzing the computational formulation and underlying mechanisms of existing methods, we provide a unified view of the wide range of semantic reasoning techniques and identify open areas for future research.