Situation Assessment for Sensor-Based Recovery Planning

We present an approach for recovery from perceptual failures, or more precisely anchoring failures. Anchoring is the problem of connecting symbols representing objects to sensor data corresponding to the same objects. The approach is based on using planning, but our focus is not on the plan generation per se. We focus on the very important aspect of situation assessment and how it is carried out for recovering from anchoring failures. The proposed approach uses background knowledge to create hypotheses about world states and handles uncertainty in terms of probabilistic belief states. This work is relevant both from the perspective of developing the anchoring framework, and as a study in plan-based recovery from epistemic failures in mobile robots. Experiments on a mobile robot are shown to validate the applicability of the proposed approach.