In this paper, we show how linguistic expressions can be generated to
describe the spatial relations between a mobile robot and its
environment, using readings from a ring of sonar sensors. Our work is
motivated by the study of human-robot communication for novice robot
users. The ultimate goal is to exploit these linguistic expressions for
navigation of the mobile robot in an unknown environment, where the
expressions represent the qualitative state of the robot in terms that
are easily understood by humans. The notion of the histogram of forces
was presented in previous work and used to generate linguistic
descriptions of relative positions in digital images. Here, we
demonstrate that it also permits fast processing of vector data and can
be applied to a robot with range sensors moving in a dynamic
environment. We introduce a new method for detecting partially and
completely surrounded conditions, and we show that detailed
descriptions can be obtained as well as coarse ones. Numerous examples
are included, illustrating a variety of situations.
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