Towards Collective Spatial Awareness Using Binary Relations

In this paper, we present an architecture for recognizing spatial relationships between real-world objects with integrated computing capabilities. The aim is to develop mechanisms for providing collectives of such artifacts with an awareness about spatial relations to other artifacts of the same collective. Therefore, an approach for recognizing binary relationships by a pairwise comparison of the spatial contexts of artifacts, as well as a novel algorithm which takes advantage of the relation properties in order to make all artifacts of the collective spatially-aware, are presented. The scope is on orientation- and distance-relationships, which are represented in a qualitative way. A general focus of this work is on the efficiency of the solutions with regard to their application in embedded systems. We expect the presented approach to be valuable for the interaction among artifacts and humans, as well as for acquiring high-level context information about artifact collectives.