Qualitative Representation and Reasoning in Cognitive Maps: A Survey from Spatial Cognition Perspective

A comprehensive survey of qualitative representations in cognitive maps is provided in this paper from spatial cognition perspective. The necessity of qualitative representation for robot navigation and map building is discussed with emphasis on different forms of qualitative information represented in different cognitive maps. By discussing the main spatial representations, which are topological representation, directional representation, distance representation, and ordering form of representation, advantages of qualitative representation are concluded as more tolerant to error, more understandable to human and less computation. An expectation is proposed that the combination of qualitative representation and quantitative information is much more practical in robot navigation and exploration.