Robotics is a practical, task-oriented branch of embodied artificial intelligence for solving real-world problems. This paper deals with a challenging sub-theme of robotics, aiming at a goal in the real world: how human beings and a robot can cooperate.

The authors summarize their research. Concepts of a comprehensive framework are described in a clear way. Knowledge is stored in one central and consistent repository of facts in web ontology language (OWL) statements. A thesaurus/ontology of terms/notions is part of this knowledge. The sensor data of the robot is conceptualized in order to reason in collaboration with the humans in designing a shared plan and actions built on those of the other agent. Further components of the system are the geometric reasoning module, the natural language processing module, and an execution controller.

The authors enlighten many aspects of human-robot interaction. Models of the human--what one specific human observes (depending on its sense organs, constrained, for instance, by its geometric position), how to resolve conflicts caused by different sensing capabilities and positions, what a human knows, what he/she can/is able to do, what he/she could infer--are important components of the common knowledge. Conceptual, geometric, and emotional data are used together to constrain the search space for activity plans of the robot. Temporal aspects of actions done by the different agents are also considered.

The authors refer to their previously implemented tools, test environments, and studies. They expose the essence of the problems, but they do not write about the implementation environment in detail--only some very simple fragments of the studies serve as illustration.

The list of references is rich, enumerating previous publications of the authors, and referring to some basic sources of the literature and some related research papers.

The main value of the paper is the clear presentation of the motivations, the challenges, and the conceptual architecture proposed. I recommend this description for those who are interested in real-world practical problem solving by the cooperation of humans and robots.