Ontology in robotics: a perspective

The talk is divided in two parts. In the first we introduce the notion of ontological analysis and foundational ontology and their role in knowledge organization and exploitation. In the second part, we look at how ontology can help artificial agents to achieve and manage commonsense/cognitive knowledge. When such knowledge is available, a robot has the potentiality to make cognition-based reasoning on the scenario at stake and on its own capabilities in a way that is understandable to human agents  promoting smoother human-robot interaction.