A ROS multi-ontology references services: OWL reasoners and application prototyping issues

The challenge of sharing and communicating information is crucial in complex human-robot interaction (HRI) scenarios. Ontologies and symbolic reasoning are the state of the art approach for a natural representation of knowledge, especially within the Semantic Web domain, and it has been adopted to achieve high expressiveness [2]. Since symbolic reasoning is a high complexity problem, optimizing its performance requires a careful design of the knowledge resolution. Specifically, a robot architecture requires the integration of several components implementing different behaviors and generating a series of beliefs. Most of the components are expected to access, manipulate, and reason upon a run-time generated representation of knowledge grounding robot behaviors and perceptions through formal axioms, with soft real-time requirements. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a de facto standard for robot software development, which allows for modular and scalable robot architecture designs.