Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Theory and Practice : Application to Robot Navigation

With the aim of automatically reasoning with spatial aspects in a cognitive way, several qualitative models have been developed recently in the Qualitative Spatial Reasoning field. However, there is no model to reason with several spatial aspects in a uniform way. Moreover, most of these models simplify spatial objects to points. In this book we present a novel approach for integrating the qualitative concepts of orientation, distance, and cardinal directions, using points as well as extended objects as primitive of reasoning, based on Constraint Logic Programming. The resulting model has been applied to build a qualitative Navigation Simulator on the structured environment of the city of Castellon.