Introduction

Contents

Autonomous mobile robots are a highly important field of interest, not only for science, but also for industry or developers of household appliances. First consumer products like autonomous lawn mowers or vacuum cleaners are already available and are likely to mark the beginning of an era of many robot applications yet to come. Within the near future, our world may be populated by service robots which could be capable of fulfilling surveillance or rescue tasks in dangerous environments or which simply assist us in our everyday life. Realizing such applications requires answers to several research topics. Devising sensible means to handle spatial information is among the most fundamental research questions to answer, since robots need to interact with space. In addition to raising research questions, mobile robots also provide a powerful tool to evaluate theories of spatial information processing under real-world conditions. Many technical challenges in building mobile robots have been mastered to a degree that reliable robot platforms suitable for indoor environments are available off-the-shelf. Prototypical realization of an indoor robot application is no longer in first matter an engineering task, but a challenge to intelligent information processing. In this sense, my work addresses the research area of spatial cognition rather than robotics, although dealing with mobile robots in terms of experimental evaluation. In particular, I investigate questions of spatial representation, reasoning, and mathematical modeling of matching tasks.