Mechanical support as a spatial abstraction for mobile robots

• Motivated by functional interpretations of spatial language terms, and the need for cognitively plausible and practical abstractions for mobile service robots, we present a spatial representation based on the physical support of one object by another, corresponding to the preposition "on". A perceptual model for evaluating this relation is suggested, and experiments-simulated as well as using a real robot -are presented. We indicate how this model can be used for important tasks such as communication of spatial knowledge, abstract reasoning and learning, taking as an example direct and indirect visual search. We also demonstrate the model experimentally and show that it produces intuitively feasible results from visual scene analysis as well as synthetic distributions that can be put to a number of uses.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Functional interpretations

Mechanical support

Mobile service robots

Perceptual model

Real robot

Spatial abstractions

Spatial knowledge

Spatial language

Spatial representations

Visual scene

Visual search

Abstracting

Computer simulation

Mobile robots

Visual communication

Information technology

Informationsteknik

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)