Ontologies used in robotics: A survey with an outlook for automated driving

Full autonomy of road vehicles is a major goal of the automotive industry. To reach such high autonomy it is necessary to provide an accurate and comprehensible situation description for the environment and the vehicle itself. A consistent depiction is essential to facilitate data exchange and communication between internal modules, e.g. collision check and environment model, as well as communication with further information sources like traffic participants vehicle to vehicle (V2V) or the infrastructure, e.g. smart traffic lights, road signs or radio traffic service (V2I). One necessary tool to create such a model could be an ontology which represents the given information and its dependencies. Initially this work provides a summary of given approaches in the literature for use of ontologies in robotics in general. Therefore approaches are stated sorted by application and task. Further approaches with focus on autonomous robots and in particular on autonomous vehicles are listed and described. Finally we give an outlook for further research topics in the domain of ontologies.