Day by day, new intelligent systems and autonomous machines are being developed to help and assist humans in a myriad of activities ranging from smart manufacturing to smart cities. Such new-generation intelligent systems need to work in teams and communicate with humans and other agents/robots to share information and coordinate activities. Furthermore, there is an increasing demand from government agencies and the private sector alike to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for tasks including search and rescue, surveillance, and monitoring. As these intelligent systems have to interact with humans in several scenarios involving multi-agent collaboration, data collection, and decision-making, it is urgent to discuss the technical as well as the ethical aspects in their design and function. Hence, ontology-based models for this Robotics and Automation (R&A) domain have the potential to enable a clear communication among the different intelligent systems and stakeholders, the formulations of standards, and the building of AI-based and robotics systems with full alignment with what stakeholders expect from these intelligent systems, in terms of economical benefits and enhanced human well-being.

Introduced as an interdisciplinary area that combines multi-agent systems, data mining and knowledge discovery, agent mining is currently in practice. To develop agent mining applications involves a combination of different approaches (model, architecture, technique and so on) from software agent and data mining (DM) areas. This paper presents an investigation of the approaches used in the agent mining systems by deeply analyzing 121 papers resulting from a systematic literature review. An ontology was defined to capitalize the knowledge collected from this study. The ontology is organized according to seven main facets: the problem addressed, the application domain, the agent-related and the mining-related elements, the models, processes and algorithms. This ontology is aimed at providing support to decisions about agent mining application design.

Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) system technology is a key element for the realization of the Industry 4.0 vision, as it is vital for tasks such as entity tracking, identification and asset management. However, the plethora of RFID systems’ elements in combination with the wide range of factors that need to be taken under consideration along with the interrelations amongst them, make the problem of identification and design of the right RFID system, based on users’ needs particularly complex. The research outlined in this paper seeks to optimize this process by developing an integrating schema that will encapsulate this information in a form that is both human and machine processible. Human readability will allow a shared understanding of the RFID technology domain; machine readability, automated reasoning engines to perform logical deduction techniques returning implicit information. For this purpose, the novel RFID System Configuration Ontology (RFID SCO) is developed. Hence, non-RFID experts are enabled to identify the most suitable RFID system according to their needs and RFID experts to retrieve all the relevant information required for the efficient design of the corresponding RFID system. The RFID SCO is validated and tested successfully against real-world scenarios provided by domain experts.

Multi-Robot System (MRS) is composed of a group of robots that work cooperatively. However, Multi-Agent System (MAS) is computational systems consisting of a group of agents that interact with each other to solve a problem. The central difference between MRS and MAS is that in the first case, the agent is a robot, and in the second, it is a software. Analyzing the scientific literature, it is possible to notice that few studies address the integration between MAS and MRS. In order to achieve the interdisciplinary integration, the theoretical background of these areas must be considered in this paper, so that the integration can be applied using a case study of decentralized MRS. The objective of this MRS is to track and surround a stationary target. Also, it has been implemented and validated in the robot simulator called Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform (V-REP). In the validation of the proposed MRS, a scenario with three robots and a stationary target were defined. In the tracking task, the robot can detect the target whose position is not known a priori. When the detection occurs, the V-REP informs the target position to the robot because the environment is discretized into a grid of rectangular cells. After that, all the robots are directed to the target, and the surround task is realized. In this task, a mathematical model with direct communication between the robots was used to keep the robots equidistant therefrom and from each other.

Cloud robotics (CR) is currently a growing area in the robotic community. Indeed, the use of cloud computing to share data and resources of distributed robotic systems leads to the design and development of cloud robotic systems (CRS) which constitute useful technologies for a wide range of applications such as smart manufacturing, aid and rescue missions. However, in order to get coherent agent-to-cloud communications and efficient agent-to-agent collaboration within these CRS, there is a need to formalize the knowledge representation in CR. Hence, the use of ontologies provides a mean to define formal concepts and their relations in an interoperable way. This paper presents standard robotic ontologies and their extension in the CR domain as well as their possible implementations in the case of a real-world CR scenario.

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of reuse, there needs to be an agreement on the meaning of terms. A common approach is to represent these terms using ontology languages that conceptualize the respective domain. In this work, we will review projects that use ontologies to support robot autonomy. We will systematically search for projects that fulfill a set of inclusion criteria and compare them with each other with respect to the scope of their ontology, what types of cognitive capabilities are supported by the use of ontologies, and which is their application domain.

The current fourth industrial revolution, or ‘Industry 4.0’ (I4.0), is driven by digital data, connectivity, and cyber systems, and it has the potential to create impressive/new business opportunities. With the arrival of I4.0, the scenario of various intelligent systems interacting reliably and securely with each other becomes a reality which technical systems need to address. One major aspect of I4.0 is to adopt a coherent approach for the semantic communication in between multiple intelligent systems, which include human and artificial (software or hardware) agents. For this purpose, ontologies can provide the solution by formalizing the smart manufacturing knowledge in an interoperable way. Hence, this paper presents the few existing ontologies for I4.0, along with the current state of the standardization effort in the factory 4.0 domain and examples of real-world scenarios for I4.0.