Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data
Papers from the AAAI Workshop
Silvia Coradeschi and Alessandro Saffiotti, Program Cochairs
Technical Report WS-04-03
86 pp., $30.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-204-4
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The anchoring problem is an important aspect of the connection between symbolic and sensory based processes in autonomous robotic systems. Anchoring is the problem of how to create, and to maintain in time, the connection between the symbol- and the signal-level representations of the same physical object. Anchoring must necessarily occur in any physically embedded system that comprises asymbolic reasoning component. A typical example is the problem of connecting, inside an autonomous robot, the symbol used by a planner to refer to a particular door, say “door-21," to the vision or laser data that correspond tothat door. This connection is necessary in orderto exploit linguistic knowledge provided by humans, e.g., regarding maps. Anchoring must also occur in a multiple robot system, since the robots must agree about the meaning of the symbols used to refer to perceived objects in the environment. A typical example is the problem of establishing the correspondence between the symbols used by two different robots embedded in the same physical environment to refer to the samephysical object. This is also needed for efficient human-robot interaction. This workshop is the third event on this subject, and it will be devoted to assessing the progress toward the development of generaltheories and techniques for anchoring. In addition, this workshop will aim at making contact with other communities that address tasks in which anchoring is present even if it is not mentioned explicitly.