An Ontology-Based Expert System to Support the Design of Humanoid Robot Components

The design of humanoid robots is a complex, challenging and time-consuming task. Due to conflicting requirements, such as human-like capabilities within human dimensions, the design of humanoid robots relies highly on the experience and expert knowledge of the engineers. This paper presents an expert system framework that allows to store this knowledge in order to reuse it for the systematic design of humanoid robot components. Based on user requirements, the system executes a multi-stage reasoning on an ontological knowledge base: Partial solutions are generated by integrating existing catalog components into potential concept solutions. After checking logical and physical constraints as well as calculating properties, these partial solutions are either discarded or combined in a bottom-up way to generate valid solutions that are then visualized by a user interface. We evaluate the developed system in terms of its capability to reproduce available solutions for state-of-the-art sensor-actuator units used in several robots as well as its capability to optimize the design of such units.