TY - GEN
T1 - Communication of spatial expressions on multi-agent systems using the qualitative Ego-Sphere
AU - Rodrigues, Felipe Martino Esposito
AU - Santos, Paulo E.
AU - Lopes, Marcos
PY - 2016/7/7
Y1 - 2016/7/7
N2 - 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).
AB - 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).
KW - Human-Robot interaction
KW - Perception
KW - Qualitative Spatial Reasoning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84979784228&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICCA.2016.7505247
DO - 10.1109/ICCA.2016.7505247
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84979784228
T3 - IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA
SP - 25
EP - 30
BT - 12th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA 2016
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
T2 - 12th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, ICCA 2016
Y2 - 1 June 2016 through 3 June 2016
ER -