• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.12
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• pp.1365-1375
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• 2016

One of the most important capabilities for autonomous service robots working in living environments is to recognize and understand the correct context in dynamically changing environment. To generate high-level context knowledge for decision-making from multiple sensory data streams, many technical problems such as multi-modal sensory data fusion, uncertainty handling, symbolic knowledge grounding, time dependency, dynamics, and time-constrained spatio-temporal reasoning should be solved. Considering these problems, this paper proposes an effective dynamic context management and spatio-temporal reasoning method for intelligent service robots. In order to guarantee efficient context management and reasoning, our algorithm was designed to generate low-level context knowledge reactively for every input sensory or perception data, while postponing high-level context knowledge generation until it was demanded by the decision-making module. When high-level context knowledge is demanded, it is derived through backward spatio-temporal reasoning. In experiments with Turtlebot using Kinect visual sensor, the dynamic context management and spatio-temporal reasoning system based on the proposed method showed high performance.