Socially assistive robotics aims at providing users with continuous support and personalized assistance, through appropriate social interactions. The design of robots capable of supporting people in heterogeneous tasks, raises several challenges among which the most relevant are the need to realise intelligent and continuous behaviours, robustness and flexibility of services and, furthermore, the ability to adapt to different contexts and needs. Artificial intelligence plays a key role in realizing cognitive capabilities like e.g., learning, context reasoning or planning that are highly needed in socially assistive robots. The integration of several of such capabilities is an open problem. This paper proposes a novel "cognitive approach" integrating ontology-based knowledge reasoning, automated planning and execution technologies. The core idea is to endow assistive robots with intelligent features in order to reason at different levels of abstraction, understand specific health-related needs and decide how to act in order to perform personalized assistive tasks. The paper presents such a cognitive approach pointing out the contribution of different knowledge contexts and perspectives, presents detailed functioning traces to show adaptation and personalization features, and finally discusses an experimental assessment proving the feasibility of the approach.
