Dr.-Ing. Daniel Beßler

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Research Staff

Tel: –49 -421 218 64016
Fax: –49 -421 218 64047
Room: TAB 1.56
Mail: danielb(at)cs[dot]uni-bremen[dot]de

About

Daniel Beßler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Bremen, Germany. He received his doctoral degree in 2022. His main research interest are symbolic AI methods in the context of autonomous robots, and combinations of different methods in hybrid systems within this domain. In the scope of his doctoral thesis, he was focusing on knowledge representation and reasoning based on formal ontologies represented in the Web Ontology Langauge (OWL). He further is a co-author of the IEEE standard P1872.2 that proposes a standard ontology for the autonomous robotics domain, and is involved in activities that are directed towards the establishment of a community in the intersection of autonomous robotics and ontology research. One of these activities is the annual RobOntics workshop that attempts to foster and consolidate research conducted in both domains. In addition, Daniel has spent a lot of effort in developing software frameworks for the robotics community. Since 2015, he is the lead developer of the KnowRob knowledge processing system which is the most widely used KR&R system for service robots nowadays. Furthermore, he is the lead developer of the openEASE system, and one of the lead-authors of the SOMA ontology.

Dissertation

Abstract– It has been demonstrated many times that modern robotic platforms can generate competent bodily behavior comparable to the level of humans. However, the implementation of such behavior requires a lot of programming effort, and is often not feasible for the general case, i.e., regardless of the situational context in which the activity is performed. Furthermore, research and industry have an enormous need for intuitive robot programming. This is due to the high complexity of realizing an integrated robot control system, and adapting it to other robots, tasks and environments. The challenge is how a robot control program can be realized that can generate competent behavior depending on characteristics of the robot, the task it executes, and the environment where it operates. One way to approach this problem is to specialize the control program through the context-specific application of abstract knowledge.

In this work, it will be investigated how abstract knowledge, required for flexible and competent robot task execution, can be represented using a formal ontology. To this end, a domain ontology of robot activity context will be proposed. Using this ontology, robots can infer how tasks can be accomplished through movements and interactions with the environment, and how they can improvise to a certain extent to take advantage of action possibilities that objects provide in their environment. Accordingly, it will be shown that parts of the context-specific information required for flexible task execution can be derived from broadly applicable knowledge represented in an ontology. Furthermore, it will be shown that the domain vocabulary yields additional benefits for the representation of knowledge gained through experimentation and simulation. Such knowledge can be leveraged for learning, or be used to inspect the robot's behavior. The latter of which will be demonstrated in this work by means of a case study.

Software Projects involved in

Publications

Books
[1]Beetz, Michael, Stelter, Simon, Beßler, Daniel, Dhanabalachandran, Kaviya, Neumann, Michael, Mania, Patrick and Haidu, Andrei, "Robots Collecting Data: Modelling Stores", Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 41–64, 2022. [bibtex] [url] [doi]
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
[2]Moritz Tenorth, Jan Winkler, Daniel Beßler and Michael Beetz, "Open-EASE – A Cloud-Based Knowledge Service for Autonomous Learning", In KI – Künstliche Intelligenz, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2015. [bibtex] [doi]
[3]Bartels, Georg, Beßler, Daniel and Beetz, Michael, "Episodic Memories for Safety-Aware Robots – Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Robots that Safely Interact with Human Co-Workers", In KI - Künstliche Intelligenz, Springer, Berlin, Germany, 2019. [bibtex] [doi]
[4]Beßler, Daniel, Porzel, Robert, Pomarlan Mihai and Beetz, Michael, "Foundational Models for Manipulation Activity Parsing", Chapter in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality – Changing Realities in a Dynamic World, Springer, 2019. 978-3-030-37869-1 [bibtex] [url]
[5]Beßler, Daniel, Bozcuoglu, Asil Kaan and Beetz, Michael, "Information System for Storage, Management and Usage for Embodied Intelligent Agents", Chapter in Information Storage from a multi-disciplinary perspective, Springer, 2019. 978-3-030-19261-7 [bibtex] [url]
[6]Olivares-Alarcos, Alberto, Beßler, Daniel, Khamis, Alaa, Goncalves, Paulo, Habib, Maki, Bermejo, Julita, Barreto, Marcos, Diab, Mohammed, Rosell, Jan, Quintas, João, Olszewska, Joanna, Nakawala, Hirenkumar, Pignaton, Edison, Gyrard, Amelie, Borgo, Stefano, Alenyà, Guillem, Beetz, Michael and Li, Howard, "A Review and Comparison of Ontology-based Approaches to Robot Autonomy", In The Knowledge Engineering Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 34, pp. e29, 2019. [bibtex] [pdf] [doi]
[7]Diab, Mohammed, Pomarlan, Mihai, Beßler, Daniel, Akbari, Aliakbar, Rosell, Jan, Bateman, John and Beetz, Michael, "SkillMaN – A skill-based robotic manipulation framework based on perception and reasoning", In Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Elsevier, vol. 134, pp. 103653, 2020. [bibtex]
Conference Papers
[8]Michael Beetz, Georg Bartels, Alin Albu-Schäffer, Ferenc Bálint-Benczédi, Rico Belder, Daniel Beßler, Sami Haddadin, Alexis Maldonado, Nico Mansfeld, Thiemo Wiedemeyer, Roman Weitschat and Jan-Hendrik Worch, "Robotic Agents Capable of Natural and Safe Physical Interaction with Human Co-workers", In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Hamburg, Germany, 2015. [bibtex] [pdf]
[9]Asil Kaan Bozcuoglu, Daniel Beßler and Michael Beetz, "Rendering Semantically-Annotated Experiment Videos out of Robot Memories", In Proceedings of the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Seoul, Korea, 2015. [bibtex]
[10]Michael Beetz, Daniel Beßler, Jan Winkler, Jan-H. Worch, Ferenc Balint-Benczedi, Georg Bartels, Aude Billard, Asil K. Bozcuoglu, Zhou Fang, Nadia Figueroa, Andrei Haidu, Hagen Langer, Alexis Maldonado, Ana-Lucia Pais, Moritz. Tenorth and Thiemo Wiedemeyer, "Open Robotics Research Using Web-based Knowledge Services", In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Stockholm, Sweden, 2016. [bibtex] [pdf]
[11]Bateman, John, Beetz, Michael, Beßler, Daniel, Bozcuoglu, Asil Kaan and Pomarlan, Mihai, "Heterogeneous Ontologies and Hybrid Reasoning for Service Robotics: The EASE Framework", In Third Iberian Robotics Conference, Sevilla, Spain, 2017. [bibtex]
[12]Michael Beetz, Daniel Beßler, Andrei Haidu, Mihai Pomarlan, Asil Kaan Bozcuoglu and Georg Bartels, "KnowRob 2.0 – A 2nd Generation Knowledge Processing Framework for Cognition-enabled Robotic Agents", In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Brisbane, Australia, 2018. [bibtex] [pdf]
[13]Beßler, Daniel, Pomarlan, Mihai and Beetz, Michael, "OWL-enabled Assembly Planning for Robotic Agents", In Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Stockholm, Sweden, 2018. Finalist for the Best Robotics Paper Award. [bibtex] [pdf]
[14]Beßler, Daniel, Pomarlan, Mihai, Akbari, Aliakbar, Muhayyuddin, Diab, Mohammed, Rosell, Jan, Bateman, John and Beetz, Michael, "Assembly Planning in Cluttered Environments through Heterogeneous Reasoning", In 41st German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 2018. [bibtex]
[15]Crespo, Jonathan, Barber, Ramon, Mozos, Oscar, Beßler, Daniel and Beetz, Michael, "Reasoning Systems for Semantic Navigation in Mobile Robots", In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2018. [bibtex]
[16]Haidu, Andrei, Beßler, Daniel, Bozcuoglu, Asil Kaan and Beetz, Michael, "KNOWROB-SIM — Game Engine-enabled Knowledge Processing for Cognition-enabled Robot Control", In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, 2018. [bibtex] [pdf] [doi]
[17]Yazdani, Fereshta, Kazhoyan, Gayane, Bozcuoglu, Asil Kaan, Haidu, Andrei, Balint-Benczedi, Ferenc, Beßler, Daniel, Pomarlan, Mihai and Beetz, Michael, "Cognition-enabled Framework for Mixed Human-Robot Rescue Team", In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, 2018. [bibtex]
[18]Diab, Mohammed, Pomarlan, Mihai, Beßler, Daniel, Abkari, Aliakbar, Rossel, Jan, Bateman, John and Beetz, Michael, "An Ontology for Failure Interpretation in Automated Planning and Execution", In Fourth Iberian Robotics Conference, Porto, Portugal, 2019. [bibtex]
[19]Beßler, Daniel, Porzel, Robert, Pomarlan Mihai, Beetz, Michael, Malaka, Rainer and Bateman, John, "A Formal Model of Affordances for Flexible Robotic Task Execution", In Proc. of the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 2020. [bibtex] [pdf]
[20]Daniel Beßler, Robert Porzel, Mihai Pomarlan, Abhijit Vyas, Sebastian Höffner, Michael Beetz, Rainer Malaka and John Bateman, "Foundations of the Socio-physical Model of Activities (SOMA) for Autonomous Robotic Agents", In Formal Ontology in Information Systems - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference, FOIS 2021, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, September 13-16, 2021, IOS Press, 2021. Accepted for publication. [bibtex] [pdf]
[21]Ahrens, Florian, Pomarlan, Mihai, Beßler, Daniel, Fehr, Thorsten, Beetz, Michael and Herrmann, Manfred, "Towards a Neuronally Consistent Ontology for Robotic Agents", In ECAI 2023, 2023. Accepted for publication. [bibtex] [pdf]
[22]Robin Nolte, Mihai Pomarlan, Daniel Beßler, Robert Porzel, Rainer Malaka and John Bateman, "Towards an Ontology for Robot Introspection and Metacognition", In Formal Ontology in Information Systems - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference, FOIS 2023, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada, July 17-20, 2023, 2023. Accepted for publication. [bibtex]
[23]Giang Nguyen, Daniel Beßler, Simon Stelter, Mihai Pomarlan and Michael Beetz, "Translating Universal Scene Descriptions into Knowledge Graphs for Robotic Environment", In 2024 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024. Accepted for publication [bibtex]
Workshop Papers
[24]Ferenc Balint-Benczedi, Thiemo Wiedemeyer, Moritz Tenorth, Daniel Beßler and Michael Beetz, "A Knowledge-Based Approach to Robotic Perception using Unstructured Information Management", In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), Istanbul, Turkey, 2015. [bibtex]
[25]Asil Kaan Bozcuoglu, Fereshta Yazdani, Daniel Beßler, Bogdan Togorean and Michael Beetz, "Reasoning on Communication Between Agents in a Human-Robot Rescue Team", In Towards Intelligent Social Robots – Current Advances in Cognitive Robotics, Seoul, Korea, 2015. [bibtex]
[26]Georg Bartels, Daniel Beßler, Michael Beetz, Moritz Tenorth and Jan Winkler, "How to Use OpenEASE: An Online Knowledge Processing System for Robots and Robotics Researchers", In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), Istanbul, Turkey, 2015. [bibtex] [pdf]
[27]Michael Beetz, Daniel Beßler and Gayane Kazhoyan, "Robotic Agents that Know What They are Doing", In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Vancouver, Canada, 2017. [bibtex]
[28]Beßler, Daniel, Koralewski, Sebastian and Beetz, Michael, "Knowledge Representation for Cognition- and Learning-enabled Robot Manipulation", In Proc. 11th International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (CogRob 2018), AAAI Press, 2018. accepted for publication [bibtex]
[29]Mohammed Diab, Mihai Pomarlan, Stefano Borgo, Daniel Beßler, Jan Rosell, John Bateman and Michael Beetz, "FailRecOnt – An Ontology-based Framework for Failure Interpretation and Recovery in Planning and Execution", In Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops co-located with the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge (BOSK 2021), Virtual & Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, September 13th to September 17th, 2021, CEUR-WS.org, 2021. accepted for publication [bibtex]
[30]Abhijit Vyas, Daniel Beßler and Michael Beetz, "Inferring dispositions from Object Shape and Material with physics game engine modelling", In RobOntics workshop, 2021. [bibtex] [pdf]
[31]Mona Abdel-Keream, Daniel Beßler, Ayden Janssen, Sascha Jongebloed, Robin Nolte, Mihai Pomarlan and Robert Porzel, "An Ontological Model of User Preferences", In RobOntics workshop, 2023. [bibtex]
Other Publications
[32]Beßler, Daniel, Robert Porzel, Mihai Pomarlan, Abhijit Vyas, Sebastian Höffner, Michael Beetz, Rainer Malaka, and John Bateman, "Foundations of the Socio-physical Model of Activities (SOMA) for Autonomous Robotic Agents", 2020. [bibtex]
[33]Daniel Beßler, Sascha Jongebloed and Michael Beetz, "Prolog as a Querying Language for MongoDB", 2021. [bibtex]
[34]Daniel Beßler, "Ontological representation of activity context for flexible robot task execution", PhD thesis, University of Bremen, 2022. [bibtex] [doi]





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