An egocentric qualitative spatial knowledge representation based on ordering information for physical robot navigation

Abstract

Navigation is one of the most fundamental tasks to be accomplished by many types of mobile and cognitive systems. Most approaches in this area are based on building or using existing allocentric, static maps in order to guide the navigation process. In this paper we propose a simple egocentric, qualitative approach to navigation based on ordering information. An advantage of our approach is that it produces qualitative spatial information which is required to describe and recognize complex and abstract, i.e., translation-invariant behavior. In contrast to other techniques for mobile robot tasks, that also rely on landmarks it is also proposed to reason about their validity despite insufficient and insecure sensory data. Here we present a formal approach that avoids this problem by use of a simple internal spatial representation based on landmarks aligned in an extended panoramic representation structure. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.