Controlling a service robot in a smart home with behavior planning and learning

The role of a service robot in a smart home can be considered as one of service providers. One difference is that this service provider can provide different services by its own and can also collaborate with others to provide different versions of services. Previous research in service provision concentrates what service devices can be integrated to introduce a new service. However, a service robot's presence can bring a new challenge to service provision. A smart home system is proposed in this paper by integrating techniques in ontology, reasoning, and planning. A user request is processed by the system to produce tasks that needs to be satisfied. A service robot performs a sequence of operations planned by hierarchical task network (HTN) planning. The use of ontology provides the definition of the context and situation in a smart home with machine-interpretable formats that will be recorded and reused. In addition, the preferences of individual users can also be recorded as personal ontology. Reasoning through case-based reasoning (CBR) determines the behaviors that a user engages in while interacting with smart homes and it also provides a learning mechanism for the interaction between the users and the smart home system.