Contexts for Symbiotic Autonomy: Semantic Mapping, Task Teaching and Social Robotics

Home environments constitute a main target location where to deploy robots, which are expected to help humans in completing their tasks. However, modern robots do not meet yet user’s expectations in terms of both knowledge and skills. In this scenario, users can provide robots with knowledge and help them in performing tasks, through a continuous human-robot interaction. This human-robot cooperation setting in shared environments is known as Symbiotic Autonomy or Symbiotic Robotics. In this paper, we address the problem of an effective coexistence of robots and humans, by analyzing the proposed approaches in literature and by presenting our perspective on the topic. In particular, our focus is on specific contexts that can be embraced within Symbiotic Autonomy: Human Augmented Semantic Mapping, Task Teaching and Social Robotics. Finally, we sketch our view on the problem of knowledge acquisition in robotic platforms by introducing three essential aspects that are to be dealt with: environmental, procedural and social knowledge.