A Semantic Web Services Driven Application on Humanoid Robots Laurentiu Vasiliu 1 , Brahmananda Sakpota 1 , Hong-Gee Kim 2 1 Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland laurentiu.vasiliu@deri.org brahmananda.sakpota@deri.org 2 Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Seoul National University 28 Yeongun-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-749, Korea hgkim@snu.ac.kr Abstract Nowadays, interdisciplinary applications are gaining more and more importance due to the complex needs of modern industrial and scientific applications. In this paper we introduce a first combined application of two different domains that are Semantic Web Services and Robotics. We first present briefly semantic web and web services, then describe the robotics development and their current limitation. Then, the paper’s core describes how semantic web and web services can be applied on robotics in order to facilitate cooperation between robots for joint tasks execution. Finally future work is described to show the next steps to be followed in the directions described in this paper. 1. Introduction This paper provides an insight into new SWS enabled robotics applications and also to define a framework and model of SWS implementation for mobile and industrial robotics applications. Until now robots worked more or less in isolation. By implementing SWS on top of them, within a network perspective, robots (mobile or fix) can be regarded as distributed web services that communicate between them semantically, sharing vital data between them and towards their coordination centres, while they interpret sent and received messages in a semantic manner. The vision is to achieve real time control and dialogue between robots along their networks in order to have a strict coordination of timing and execution as well as to allow advanced real-time task reconfigurations for new tasks assignment, failure compensation and execution optimisation. Also, when considered industrial robotics application, data sharing between organisations is aimed to be reached at robot- machine level, in order to allow atomic operations to be described, parameters communicated and re- adjustments done in real time. 2. Semantic Web and Web Services The next step enhancement in current Web technology is Semantic Web. It makes data published on the Web machine understandable. Its use increases the modularity of the data on the Web. It has been built on syntaxes that use Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) to represent data in the form of Triples as defined in RDF (Resource Description Framework). An URI is a web identifier and a Triple can be described by using a set of three URIs. Since the data is described in a clear way with universally unique identifier, there will be no data ambiguity and machines can easily understand the meaning of data presented on the web. Such data can dynamically be linked with the help of ontologies. The need of enterprise application integration and interoperability between distributed environments initiated both the research and industrial consortia to investigate new technological paradigm. Web Services technology was emerged intending to be a dominant paradigm by addressing integration and interoperability Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE Workshop on Software Technologies for Future Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems and Second International Workshop on Collaborative Computing, Integration, and Assurance (SEUS-WCCIA’06) 0-7695-2560-1/06 $20.00 © 2006 IEEE