It’s just semantics! You’ve probably heard that many times.

But with robotics, you won’t hear “it’s just semantics,” because semantics plays a vital role in the advancement of robots as home helpers.  Semantics is the study of meaning in language, and how the wrapping of words corresponds to what could be meant by those words.

Researchers for years have been studying how to enable a robot to understand semantics, thereby giving it the ability to use its knowledge to make decisions that will be indispensable for home helper robots. Great strides are being made all over the globe!

Last week at the IROS Conference in San Francisco,  University of Tokyo and Technische Universität München demonstrated how their Willow Garage PR2 robot could fetch a sandwich for the researcher. 

Using what is known as “Semantic Learning”, with no detailed information on sandwiches but with a database created by internet searches, the robot was able to learn that sandwiches are a type of food that are customarily found in kitchens and restaurants. With that information,  the PR2 was able to figure out where to look for the sandwich and, ultimately, make it’s way down to the local Subway restaurant and bring back a sandwich to the researcher.

As you’ll see from the video, it does take the robot a while to do this, but for the robot to actually accomplish this task at all is a major breakthrough toward artificial intelligence necessary for a home helper robot.

A Little About Willow Garage
In late 2006, Willow Garage was founded by Scott Hassan, best known as the founder of eGroups (a group email messaging company now known as Yahoo Groups), and the key software architect/developer of Google. Hassan’s interest in Open Source software, robotics and autonomy led him on a mission to accelerate the development of non-military robotics and advance open source robotics software.

In May of 2010, Willow Garage a gave out eleven PR2 Beta robots at no cost to leading research institutions in robotics to accelerate robotics applications and research. The lucky recipients of these $400,000 bots were:

• Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
• Bosch
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
• MIT CSAIL
• Stanford University
• Technische Universität München
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Lab
• University of Southern California
• University of Tokyo, JSK Robotics Laboratory

All of these institutions are busy making their PR2s do a variety of tasks. We’ve seen them making breakfast, folding clothes and now picking up a sandwich from Subway! Can’t wait to see what’s next!