Here's a translation of an actual seminar announcement: CS 298-11 Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems Dr. ******* ****** SRI Thursday, March 7, 1991 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. 45 Evans Hall UC Berkeley ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ WHAT HE SAYS | WHAT HE MEANS Autonomous Navigation Using | How to Get Around Evidential Reasoning Techniques | the Office by Yourself Purposeful autonomous behavior requires hav- | You must know where you are ing reliable locative information in order | in order to get around. to help assess the desirability of pursuing | particular actions to sense, perceive, or | alter one's position in the environment. | Having the ability to ascertain location | You'd like to be able to get based on imperfect perceptual cues that | around with your glasses off are extracted from real-world contexts is a | or with your eyes closed. critical requirement for truly autonomous | closed-loop behavior. While some of the | well known non-perceptual locative techniques | You can walk around with your such as dead reckoning, registration of | eyes closed, but it's hard. inertial or geo-stationary-satellite loca- | tion data with an environmental map, and | Some people have tried maintaining a global cartesian-map | navigating with satellite representation throughout movement activi- | uplinks, but this didn't ties remain topics of investigations, they | work well in our office. require near perfect measurements of direc- | tion and traversed distances, significant | computation resources, and are limited by the | range of their sensors. To extend current | autonomous navigation capabilities that are | We have found that we can get limited by these requirements, increasing at- | around by feeling our way along tention has focused on developing robust | the wall of our office. perceptual-based inference techniques that | derive location hypotheses through the in- | terpretation of perceptual cues within | the context of environmental map descrip- | tions. Some recent work on perceptual-based naviga- | You can feel your way around tion schemes has emphasized the integration | better if you know the room of distinct sensor modality data within the | (that's why we're using our context of an environmental model to assess | office). location. In this talk, we discuss an ap- | proach to autonomous perceptual-based naviga- | Sometimes you have to flip tion that uniquely exploits evidential rea- | a coin. soning (ER) techniques which embody interval | probabilistic methods that are based on | work of Dempster and Shafer. We will | describe how such ER techniques can be used | We describe how to get around to fuse and interpret multisensor data within | our office on a skateboard the context of a sparse spatial map of an of- | that we built ourselves. fice environment to infer location, and show | the results of preliminary experiments with | an autonomous mobile platform. Translated by Paul Heckbert and Seth Teller