Modularization of skill ontologies for industrial robots

With industrial robots ready to take the next step in mastering manufacturing tasks new approaches to reduce the programming effort are needed. This is achieved by introducing skills as robot "know-how" and using them as a higher abstraction level of robot instructions during programming. The skills are reusable items providing motion control and rich declarative descriptions of complex robot capabilities. Storing the skills requires an adequate knowledge representation model that enables reuse and reasoning on skills and simplifies knowledge management. In this paper we report on development of a skill representation model and its implementation in a knowledge base. The developed model is effectively a class hierarchy of the skill concepts implemented in a modularized ontology structure. The resulting model clarifies the intrinsic concepts of a skill and presents a module structure that enables the future development and reuse of skills in general.