Combining Linked Open Data and Multimedia Knowledge Base for Digital Cultural Heritage Robotic Applications

The current trends in society evolution are showing rapid changes in our habitual environments and consequently affecting human interactions with them. Among the key factors of this process we can certainly cite the growth of BigData favored by the knowledge digitalization, the dissemination of sensors in environments and the advancements of connectivity capabilities. At the same time, the progress in artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics has lead to the production of sophisticated humanoid robots, which are progressively spreading to a wide public. In this way, research efforts are needed for a proper knowledge management and knowledge acquisition by machines, in order to have more natural and friendly human-robot interactions in daily tasks, usually performed by human beings. In this paper we show an approach related to a human-robot interaction in cultural heritage context, simulating a digital ecosystem where a robot plays the role of a guide for tourists and it is able to proactively interact with its interlocutors by combining both semantic and visual information. The proposed approach, its implementation and experimental results on a real robotic platform are shown and discussed.