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Foundations for a Formalism of Nearness

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Book cover AI 2002: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2557))

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Abstract

Reasoning about your spatial environment can be a challenging task, especially when you are a robot trying to rely solely on quantitative measures. With nearness being such a vague concept, a qualitative representation is an obvious choice offering a wider range of possible values.

This paper introduces a qualitative representation for spatial proximity that accounts for absolute binary nearness relations. The formalism is based on the notion of perceived points, called sites, in a point based universe. Proximity concepts are determined by the parameters of distance between two sites and weight of each of those sites. These parameters were drawn from the concept of Generalised Voronoi Diagrams.

Cognitively useful models and interpretations of our formalism are shown in both a navigation and a natural language context.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering Artificial Intelligence Group, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Jane Brennan & Eric Martin

Authors
  1. Jane Brennan
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  2. Eric Martin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales, ACT 2600, Canberra, Australia

    Bob McKay

  2. Computer Science Laboratory, Australian National University, RSISE Building, ACT 0200, Canberra, Australia

    John Slaney

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Brennan, J., Martin, E. (2002). Foundations for a Formalism of Nearness. In: McKay, B., Slaney, J. (eds) AI 2002: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2557. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36187-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36187-1_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00197-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36187-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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