From Cogwheels to Concepts: A Perspective on the Interplay of Robotics and Ontology

The hard problems of robotics occur at the interface of an artificial agent and its surrounding physical world: perception and action. These are often regarded as tasks requiring tacit, unformalized and possibly unformalizable knowledge, making ontology engineering of apparently little value for robotics. We argue instead that an important role has appeared for ontology in current developments in robotics. Recent AI techniques such as foundation models have revealed the potential of explicit knowledge to be useful at all parts of a robotic system, but these techniques will require assistance from formal, verifiable methods to produce trustworthy systems. Further, robotics can contribute to the development of ontology engineering. As robotic agents become more autonomously capable, questions about the meaning of agency and responsibility become increasingly pressing, and will require careful consensus building across a variety of stakeholder groups. Finally, robotics may be a challenging test ground for the philosophical assumptions underlying foundational ontologies, and can thus assist the ontology engineering community in better understanding the consequences of ontological modeling decisions more generally.