• Journal of KIISE
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.211-223
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose a robot-centered direction relation representation and the relevant reasoning methods for indoor service robots. Many conventional works on qualitative spatial reasoning, when deciding the relative direction relation of the target object, are based on the use of position information only. These reasoning methods may infer an incorrect direction relation of the target object relative to the robot, since they do not take into consideration the heading direction of the robot itself as the base object. In this paper, we present a robot-centered direction relation representation and the reasoning methods. When deciding the relative directional relationship of target objects based on the robot in an indoor environment, the proposed methods make use of the orientation information as well as the position information of the robot. The robot-centered reasoning methods are implemented by extending the existing cone-based, matrix-based, and hybrid methods which utilized only the position information of two objects. In various experiments with both the physical Turtlebot and the simulated one, the proposed representation and reasoning methods displayed their high performance and applicability.