Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data: Preliminary Report

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 17

Cognitive Modeling

Anchoring is the process of creating and maintaining the correspondence between symbols and percepts that refer to the same physical objects. Although this process must necessarily be present in any symbolic reasoning system embedded in a physical environment (e.g., an autonomous robot), no systematic study of anchoring as a clearly separated problem has been reported in the intelligent system community. In this paper, we propose a domain-independent definition of the anchoring problem, and identify its three basic functionalities: find, reacquire, and track. We illustrate our definition on two working systems in two different domains: an unmanned airborne vehicle for aerial surveillance; and a mobile robot for office navigation