To secure an anchor - a recovery planning approach to ambiguity in perceptual anchoring

An autonomous robot using symbolic reasoning, sensing and acting in a real environment needs the ability to create and maintain the connection between symbols representing objects in the world and the corresponding perceptual representations given by its sensors. This connection has been named perceptual anchoring. In complex environments, anchoring is not always easy to establish: the situation may often be ambiguous as to which percept actually corresponds to a given symbol. In this paper, we extend perceptual anchoring to deal robustly with ambiguous situations by providing general methods for detecting them and recovering from them. We consider different kinds of ambiguous situations. We also present methods to recover from these situations based on automatically formulating them as conditional planning problems that then are solved by a planner. We illustrate our approach by showing experiments involving a mobile robot equipped with a color camera and an electronic nose.