Action Selection and Execution in Everyday Activities: A Cognitive Robotics and Situation Model Perspective

Commonsense knowledge in cognitive robotics: a systematic literature review

One of the big challenges in robotics is the generalization necessary for performing unknown tasks in unknown environments on unknown objects. For us humans, this challenge is simplified by the commonsense knowledge we can access. For cognitive robotics, representing and acquiring commonsense knowledge is a relevant problem, so we perform a systematic literature review to investigate the current state of commonsense knowledge exploitation in cognitive robotics. For this review, we combine a keyword search on six search engines with a snowballing search on six related reviews, resulting in 2,048 distinct publications. After applying pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, we analyse the remaining 52 publications. Our focus lies on the use cases and domains for which commonsense knowledge is employed, the commonsense aspects that are considered, the datasets/resources used as sources for commonsense knowledge and the methods for evaluating these approaches. Additionally, we discovered a divide in terminology between research from the knowledge representation and reasoning and the cognitive robotics community. This divide is investigated by looking at the extensive review performed by Zech et al. (The International Journal of Robotics Research, 2019, 38, 518-562), with whom we have no overlapping publications despite the similar goals.

Everyday Activities

The ease with which humans usually perform everyday activities masks their inherit complexity. Tasks such as setting a table prior to a meal or preparing a hot beverage require the coordination of several cognitive abilities. At the same time, many everyday activities are simple enough to afford investigation in controlled lab settings. One main goal of this issue is to raise awareness of everyday activities as a topic and a field of study in its own right, which allows investigating (a) selected cognitive abilities with high ecological validity and (b) the interplay and integration of key cognitive abilities. To this end, this topic consists of eight papers that span different aspects of everyday activities, ranging from neuroscience through philosophical considerations and implications to lessons from robotics.