Contextualization in Mobile Robots

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze some work on mobile robots with the goal of highlighting the use of contextual information to obtain a flexible and robust performance of the system. In particular, we analyzed the use of context in different robotic tasks, ranging from robot behavior to perception, and then propose to characterize this process of “contextualization” as a design pattern. As a result we argue that many different tasks indeed can exploit contextual information and, therefore, a single explicit representation of this information may lead to significant advantages both in the design and in the performance.