Application of KnowRob: Tidying up a kitchen

In a recent demonstration, the bachelor project SUTURO of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bremen presented its results. The project, partly self-organized by 14 Bachelor students, aims at teaching a PR2 robot to tidy up a kitchen. This involves very challenging tasks in robot perception, manipulation and grasping, task-level coordination and knowledge representation to recognize objects, infer where they shall be put, and interact with them in the appropriate way. The PR2 is able to recognize objects of different kinds and sort them into a box (for non-edible items) or bring them to the opposite counter (in case they are edible). If an object is unknown, it tries to scan the barcode and retrieve semantic information about this object from the Web. More information can be found in the video on the right and on the SUTURO homepage.

KnowRob has been used as a semantic layer for integrating information from perception (such as the object's position and attributes) with background knowledge about typical attributes of object classes and their storage locations. It was also used to interface the barcode scanning module and the module for retrieving product information from the Web.