Qualitative Velocity and Ball Interception

In many approaches for qualitative spatial reasoning, navigation of an agent in a more or less static environment is considered (e.g. in the double-cross calculus [13]). However, in general, the environment is dynamic, which means that both the agent itself and also other objects and agents in the environment may move. Thus, in order to perform spatial reasoning, not only (qualitative) distance and orientation information is needed (as e.g. in [1]), but also information about (relative) velocity of objects (see e.g. [2]). Therefore, we will introduce concepts for qualitative and relative velocity: (quick) to left, neutral, (quick) to right. We investigate the usefulness of this approach in a case study, namely ball interception of simulated soccer agents in the RoboCup [11]. We compare a numerical approach where the interception point is computed exactly, a strategy based on reinforcement learning, a method with qualitative velocities developed in this paper, and the naı̈ve method where the agent simply goes directly to the actual ball position.