Ontology enhancing process for a situated and curiosity-driven robot

•A new framework for human–robot interaction is proposed.•A meaningful representation of the world model by using ontologies is implemented.•We propose a framework that solves the grounding problem in the area of human–robot collaboration.

Nowadays, robots need to be able to interact with humans and objects in a flexible way and should be able to share the same knowledge (physical and social) of the human counterpart. Therefore, there is a need for a framework for expressing and sharing knowledge in a meaningful way by building the world model. In this paper, we propose a new framework for human–robot interaction using ontologies as powerful way of representing information which promote the sharing of meaningful knowledge between different objects. Furthermore, ontologies are powerful notions able to conceptualise the world in which the object such as Robot is situated. In this research, ontology is considered as improved solution to the grounding problem and enables interoperability between human and robot. The proposed system has been evaluated on a large number of test cases; results were very promising and support the implementation of the solution.