Qualitative spatial understanding and the control of mobile robots

Abstract

The objective of the work described is to produce autonomous robots which can freely wander about while creating and improving maps of their environment which can then be used for navigation and planning. It is suggested that qualitative spatial understanding provides an underlying representation and learning mechanism to form spatial memories without requiring complicated object recognition or precise determination of environmental locations. The work to date has dealt mainly with viewframe extraction and matching. Areas and potential simplifications which need to be explored are discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>