Collision avoidance with bipartite arrangements

• Authors: Björn Gottfried
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Research in knowledge representation for autonomous systems
• Year: 2005

We demonstrate that qualitative spatial reasoning techniquesprovide useful means for autonomous systems in the context of collision avoidance. A qualitative spatial representation is presented which relies on quite abstract distinctions which describe how two objects can be aligned relative to each other. Possible alignments involve left and right, front and back, during, contains, and overlaps. It is shown how such qualitative relations already allow to make important decisions,for instance, in order to predict collisions. While the proposed calculus guarantees that predictions about collision-free situations never lead to collisions, predictions about collisions do not necessarily lead to collisions (though they occur more likely when they are predicted). We shall learn that it is by no means necessary to utilise precise measurements in order to predict collisions.