Glossary
- Action
Action is a general term, and might refer to different concept depending on the context. In this documentation, it might either refer to a ROS action (ie, a low-level asynchronous communication mechanism between ROS node) or a chatbot action, triggered in response to a verbal command (see communication/rasa_chatbot:Custom actions).
- Activity
See Task
- Application
An application is what creates and manage the behaviour robot. Only one application can be running at a given time. It includes at least a mission controller, and possibly many additional software components, depending on its needs.
- ASR
ASR stands for automatic speech recognition (also sometimes called speech-to-text): the process of converting speech (recorded by the robot’s microphone) into written text.
- Capability
See skill
- Fact
See statement
- Intent
An abstract description (a ROS message) representing something that someone wants the robot to perform. Intents are usually published by the user-perception nodes (like the dialogue manager, or the touchscreen manager), and are processed by the mission controller.
Not to be confused with the chatbot intents, which are internal to the chatbot, and not visible outside of it. See dialogue_management for more about chatbots.
See also: Intents
- Knowledge base
The robot’s knowledge base is a semantic database where you can store and query facts (also called statements), and perform first-order logic reasoning.
- Mission
- Mission controller
The mission controller is the software that controls the main behaviour of the robot: it is the core software component of your application. It schedules and execute skills based on user intents and other application-specific needs.
- Ontology
In computer science, an ontology is a network of semantic concepts related to each others. It is also refered as semantic graph. The knowledge is stored in ontologies using formalisms like RDF/OWL. On our robot, we using ontologies to store the semantic knowledge of the robot.
- OWL
OWL stands for Web Ontology Language and it the format in which we store symbolic knowledge in our ontologies and knowledge base.
- rpk
- Skill
Skills are ‘unit’ operations executed by the robot: navigating to a location, looking at a specific target, grasping an object, etc. ROS4HRI standardizes multiple ROS4HRI Standard Skills, and you can implement your own custom ones as well.
See also: ROS4HRI Standard Skills
- Statement
A statement refers to a piece of information (formally, a <subject, predicate, object> triple), stored (or retrieved) from the robot’s knowledge base.
- Task
An task represents a finite set of actions performed by the robot to achieve a specific goal (i.e. “Doing an Inventory”, “Getting a glass of water”, “Going to the kitchen”). In other systems, it is sometimes refered as an activity.
- Triples
See statement