Modeling Motion with Qualitative Process Theory

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2

Knowledge Representation

Representing motion is an important part of Naive Physics. Previous qualitative models of motion were centered around the idea of Qualitative States. This paper discusses an alternative representation in terms of Qualitative Process Theory. Viewing motion as a process has several advantages, notably the ability to make more detailed inferences about dynamics and the ability to combine process descriptions to model more complex systems. After examining the relationship between Qualitative State and QP theory representations of motion, the utility of the QP representations are illustrated by analyzing an oscillator.