Interpreting route instructions as qualitative spatial actions

Abstract

In this paper we motivate the use of qualitative spatial actions as the fundamental unit in processing user route instructions. The spatial action model has been motivated by an analysis of empirical studies in human-robot interaction on the navigation task, and can be interpreted as a conceptual representation of the spatial action to be performed by the agent in their navigation space. Furthermore, we sketch out two distinct models of interpretation for these actions in cognitive robotics. In the first, the actions are related to a formalized conceptual user modeling of navigation space, while in the second the actions are interpreted as fuzzy operations on a voronoi graph. Moreover, we show how this action model allows us to better capture the points at which user route instructions become out of alignment with a robot's knowledge of the environment through a number of examples. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.