Exploring the cognitive process for service task in smart home: A robot service mechanism

Abstract

Smart home (SH) has been widely viewed as a promising paradigm to enhance the quality of life by providing context-aware services. Although the remarkable progress in SH has been made, it still remains a challenging problem to actively discover and provide complex service tasks in a proper way, especially bridging the gap between the complex tasks and the executable task descriptions by robot. To address this problem, this paper explores a robot service mechanism based on system cooperation in SH. Through the combination of intelligent space and robot, a system architecture of SH is presented, where the abilities of environmental perception and service execution can be effectively improved. For supporting the proposed system architecture and service task, a knowledge-based context model is proposed to address the data heterogeneity issue. Then the robot service mechanism of how to actively discover and provide the service task in the right way is fully revealed, the purpose of which is to provide a feasible solution for improving the quality of life. In particular, the comprehensive cognitive process of service task, including task cognition, task inference, task planning and task assessment, and autonomous navigation of service robot are exposed. The comprehensive experimental evaluations are conducted in the real-world, and the results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the presented schemes.