Communication of spatial expressions on multi-agent systems using the qualitative Ego-Sphere

Felipe Martino Esposito Rodrigues, Paulo E. Santos, Marcos Lopes

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The need for spatial representations and spatial reasoning is omnipresent in various real world applications of autonomous systems. The task of the qualitative spatial reasoning sub-field of Artificial Intelligence is to provide formalisms allowing a machine to represent and make inferences about spatial entities. In this work we make use of one such formalism for representing qualitative location, named Qualitative Ego-Sphere (QES), that discretises the world around a visual agent into sectors, as well as with respect to the relative distance of objects from the observer's point of view. QES was used in this paper as a means for communicating spatial expressions between pairs of agents. Four situations were proposed and implemented in order to address interactions between pairs of artificial agents and between an artificial agent and a human. Tests with human volunteers suggested that the human description of space in sectors agrees with the qualitative discretisation provided by QES. However, no similar agreement rates were obtained regarding the description of space related to the distance between objects. This was arguably due to the fact that qualitative distance judgements imply the existence of some relative external reference frame (not taken into account in the Qualitative Ego-Sphere formalism).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication12th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA 2016
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Pages25-30
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781509017386
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Jul 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event12th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA 2016 - Kathmandu, Nepal
Duration: 1 Jun 20163 Jun 2016

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA
Volume2016-July
ISSN (Print)1948-3449
ISSN (Electronic)1948-3457

Conference

Conference12th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA 2016
Country/TerritoryNepal
CityKathmandu
Period1/06/163/06/16

Keywords

  • Human-Robot interaction
  • Perception
  • Qualitative Spatial Reasoning

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