====== KnowRob at ICRA 2018 ======

We are proud to announce that the second generation of the KnowRob has been presented at ICRA'18 in Brisbane Australia.

KnowRob was first introduced in 2009 [1] where Tenorth and Beetz argue that autonomous robot control demands KR&R systems that address several aspects that are commonly not sufficiently considered in AI KR&R systems, such as that robots need a more fine-grained action representation. This was pointed out early by Tenorth and Beetz [2] when they argued that service robots should be able to cope with (often) shallow and symbolic instructions, and to fill in the gaps to generate detailed, grounded, and (often) real-valued information needed for execution.

We have introduced the second generation of the KnowRob system at ICRA'18 [3] where the focus of development has shifted towards the integration of simulation and rendering techniques into a hybrid knowledge processing architecture. The rational is to re-use components of the control program in virtual environments with physics and almost photorealistic rendering, and to acquire experiential knowledge from these sources. Experiential knowledge, called //narrative enabled episodic memory// in KnowRob, is used to draw conclusions about what action parametrization is likely to succeed in the real world (e.g., through learning methods) -- this principle is inspired by the simulation theory of cognition [4].

The architecture blueprint for KnowRob 2.0 is depicted below.

{{ :blog:knowledge-components3.png?direct&600 |}}

Displayed components exist at least prototypically, and will be elaborated more in future publications.

<code>
[1] Moritz Tenorth, Michael Beetz,
    "KnowRob – knowledge processing for autonomous personal robots",
    In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IEEE, pp. 4261–4266, 2009.
[2] Moritz Tenorth, Michael Beetz,
    "Representations for robot knowledge in the KnowRob framework",
    In: Artificial Intelligence, Elsevier, 2015. 
[3] Michael Beetz, Daniel Beßler, Andrei Haidu, et al.,
    "KnowRob 2.0 – A 2nd Generation Knowledge Processing Framework for Cognition-enabled Robotic Agents".
    In: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2018.
[4] Germund Hesslow,
    "The current status of the simulation theory of cognition",
    In: Brain Research 1428, pp. 71–79, 2012.
</code>

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