Rough Mereology as a language for a minimalist mobile robot's eenvironment description

Abstract

Rough Mereology is a paradigm for approximate reasoning proposed by Polkowski and Skowron in 1994. The basic primitive notion of Rough Mereology is the notion of a part to a degree and the functor returning this value is called the rough inclusion. Rough Mereology has been shown to be a very flexible tool in problems of Approximate Reasoning including reasoning in many-agent systems, spatial reasoning, granulation of knowledge problems, computing with words paradigm, among others. Here, it is applied to provide a language aimed at describing the mobile robot environment in case of a minimalist mobile robot equipped with an omnidirectional sonar and navigating in the environment of a sonar GPS. Mereological constructs are applied toward definitions of geometric notions and navigation algorithms are based on these geometric notions. Some results of experiments with the real robot Pioneer 2DX are reported showing the applicability of rough mereology in mobile robot navigation tasks.© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.