Enhancing qualitative relative orientation with qualitative distance for robot path planning

Humans reason about different aspects of space (such as relative orientation, cardinal directions, distance, size and shape of objects) quite easily. With the aim of simulating human behavior, several models for these spatial concepts have been developed. Cognitive considerations have made these frameworks qualitative because it seems to deal better with the imprecision that human perception provides. Unfortunately no operational model which allows to reason with all these spatial aspects in an integrated way has been developed up to now. The first aim of our research has been the integration of different spatial concepts which is accomplished by the definition of an operational model based on first order predicate logic. Constraint logic programming extended with constraint handling rules provides the level of abstraction suited for the integration of qualitative relative orientation and qualitative distance. The second aim of our work is to apply qualitative spatial reasoning to robot path planning.