Requirements and Specifications for Robots, Linked Data and all the REST René Schubotz, Christian Vogelgesang, André Antakli, Dmitri Rubinstein, Torsten Spieldenner German Research Center for Artifcial Intelligence Saarbrücken, Germany ABSTRACT The use of autonomous robots in both industry and every day life has increased signifcantly in the recent years. A growing number of robots is connected to and operated from networks, including the World Wide Web. Consequently, the Robotics community is explor- ing and adopting REST (Representational State Transfer) architec- tural principles and considers the use of Linked Data technologies as fruitful next step. However, we observe a lack of concise and stable specifcations of how to properly leverage the RESTful para- digm and Linked Data concepts in the Robotics domain. Introducing the notion of Linked Robotic Things, we provide a minimalistic, yet well-defned specifcation covering a minimal set of requirements with respect to the use of HTTP and RDF. 1 INTRODUCTION Robotic systems are widely used in modern society and have sig- nifcant impact to economics and social aspects. However, most of these robots are not able to act in a context aware manner. For example, many industry robots execute hard coded programs in a caged working space. With the increasing demand for fexibility in production processes and enhanced human-robot collaboration, robotic systems have to interact naturally with their environment, other robots and humans. To achieve this, robotic systems must acquire deeper knowledge about their environment, for example by tapping into other software and information systems. In this respect, Kamei et al. [17] argue that for the successful design of fexible, extendable, re-usable applications, robots are required to be provided as abstracted resource in a łcloud of robotsž. Subsequently, parts of the robots, the actions that can be performed, and tasks that are to be fulflled by performing the described actions need to be provided in a unifed format. © 2017 Copyright held by the author/owners. SEMANTiCS 2017 workshops proceedings: LIDARI September 11-14, 2017, Amsterdam, Netherlands Consequently, the Robotics community is exploring and adopting REST (Representational State Transfer) architectural principles and considers the use of Linked Data technologies as fruitful next step. However, we observe a lack of concise and stable specifcations of how to properly leverage the RESTful paradigm and Linked Data concepts in the Robotics domain. In the scope of this paper, we identify a set of desiderata that we consider vital for successfully implementing Linked Data-driven robotic systems and applications. Introducing the notion of Linked Robotic Things, we provide a minimalistic, yet well-defned specif- cation covering a minimal set of requirements with respect to the desiderata identifed. Our contributions include in particular: (1) the Robotic Thing Model, a minimalistic core specifcation for truly RESTful łWeb Roboticsž. (2) the notion of Linked Robotic Things as a semantic extension of Web-enabled robots. (3) the Linked Robotic Thing Model, a basic contract allowing clients to automatically discover and interoperate with Linked Robotic Things. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. We outline the development of łWeb Roboticsž and report on recent research in the Linked Data community (cf. Section 2). Next, several high-level desiderata for Linked Data-driven robotic systems and applications (cf. Section 3) are discussed. Section 4 presents a minimal speci- fcation of Web-enabled robots meeting the criteria for level 3 of the Richardson Maturity Model. We propose a semantic extension of Web-enabled robots in Section 5, and defne the Linked Robotic Thing Model in Section 6. Future work is outlined in Section 7 , and we conclude with summary in Section 8. 2 FROM TELELABS TO WEB ROBOTICS Active since 1994, the UWA Telelabs Project ofers remote access to an industrial robot for tele-manipulations in a blocks world and initi- ated the subfeld of łInternet Roboticsž [40]. Evolving from internet- based interfaces to robotic systems [7, 16, 29], to networked control middlewares [1, 5, 46], service-oriented approaches using various instantiations of the web service protocol stack [4, 6, 22, 23, 28] and fnally to RESTful services for robotic applications [23, 34, 42, 45], researchers in the feld consider the use of the World Wide Web and its associated technologies as a scalable robotics application platform [18, 36, 53, 55]. Rather than exposing real-world data and functionality through vertical system designs, proponents of łWeb Roboticsž suggest to apply the REST architectural style [11, 37] to Web-enabled robots in the physical world and thus to make them an integral part of the Web. Following the very same line of argument, the Linked Data com- munity explores the relationship between software and information systems and the Web. Initially focusing on aligning SPARQL with