Perceptual anchoring: A key concept for plan execution in embedded systems

Abstract

Anchoring is the process of creating and maintaining the correspondence between symbols and percepts that refer to the same physical objects. This process must necessarily be present in any physically embedded system that includes a symbolic component, for instance, in an autonomous robot that uses a planner to generate strategic decisions. However, no systematic study of anchoring as a problem per se has been reported in the literature on intelligent systems. In this paper, we advocate for the need for a domain-independent framework to deal with the anchoring problem, and we report some initial steps in this direction. We illustrate our arguments and framework by showing experiments performed on a real mobile robot.