Improving robot situational awareness through commonsense: Side-stepping incompleteness and unsoundness

Robots are continuously being deployed in ever challenging domains with tasks of increasing complexity. With these mounting challenges, robots will need to gain a better understanding of their environment and the status of surrounding dynamic obstacles. Human situational awareness may provide robots with this greater understanding. Presently, no straightforward approach is known for achieving human level situational awareness within robotic systems. This paper presents an initial exploration into the possibilities of utilizing commonsense reasoning for the explicit purpose of fostering robot situational awareness. The paper opens with a description of both situational awareness and commonsense reasoning and some of the challenges involved in incorporating these abilities into robotic systems. A possible system is described for improving robot situational awareness through the use of commonsense reasoning. The paper concludes with an initial proof of concept evaluation of the proposed system.