SimSpace: A Tool to Interpret Route Instructions with Qualitative Spatial Knowledge

This paper describes our work on using qualitative spatial interpretation and reasoning to achieve a natural and efficient interaction between a human and an intelligent robot on navigation tasks. The Conceptual Route Graph, which combines conventional route graphs and qualitative spatial orientation calculi, serves as an internal model of human spatial knowledge on top of the robot’s quantitative representation, such that humans’ qualitative route instructions can be interpreted according to the model. The tool SimSpace then visualizes and proves the interpretation using qualitative spatial reasoning. Furthermore, SimSpace will generate appropriate natural feedback if a route instruction cannot be interpreted properly.