Cognitive Spatial Representations for Mobile Robots: Perspectives from a User Study

Abstract

Robots are rapidly evolving from factory work-horses to robot-companions.The future of robots, as our companions, is highly dependent on their ability to understand, interpret and represent the environment in an efficient and consistent fashion, in a way that is comprehensible to humans.The work presented here is oriented in this direction.It suggests a hierarchical concept oriented representation of space that is based on objects.This work attempts to provide a "cognitive" validation to the proposed representation and also looks into ways of enhancing it.This is done by means of an elaborate user study experiment.Analysis of the data obtained from the user study provides a human perspective to the robotics problem.This work also attempts to put forward a more generic methodology in order to develop such a representation, to be able to map the robots sensory information to increasingly abstract concepts that describe the semantics of the space the robot inhabits.The work itself is aimed at radically improving the degree of spatial awareness of state-of-the-art robot systems.Thus, the theme of the work is -representation for spatial cognition.