The effects of using GPS systems on spatial knowledge acquisition and the respective role of spatial design

Navigation is one of the very first and common spatial behaviours that human-beings do within the physical environment; it is defined as a process of moving within the place with a goal of reaching a destination in a timely manner. This behaviour might seem to be a simple task since it is very common; however, it involves many multilevel cognitive processing and thus has received considerable attention from different disciplines. The recent emergence of Location-Based Services and the use of its popular form as mobile navigation systems by people in their everyday life have had a significant impact on navigation process. As people are increasingly using mobile navigation systems, research from a broad range of disciplines has examined the effectiveness of these systems, some of which have picked up worrying signs related to their use. One of these issues is concerned with spatial knowledge acquisition. The empirical studies, using different methods, have examined the effects of information provision by mobile navigation systems on people’s spatial knowledge acquisition; they have studied the extent of which, people who use mobile navigation systems, can comprehend the physical environment comparing to those who do not use such systems or use other types of assistance, such as physical maps; or how accurately they can remember the location of the physical elements such as landmarks and spatial organisation between them, as well as how well they can estimate distances and directions between places. These studies have often demonstrated that mobile navigation systems are not very effective tools in helping people to acquire spatial knowledge. Nonetheless, there is a lack of study on the relationship between the physical features of the physical environment and the extent of spatial knowledge acquisition by mobile navigation systems. Research has shown that the physical environment, which navigation takes place within, is known as a key determinant in helping people to acquire spatial knowledge and has found many spatial factors of the physical environment that are influential on people’s spatial knowledge acquisition, such as specific positions of landmark along the route, the form and length of routes, the shape and form of landmarks, the configurational complexity of the environment, the number of turns along a route, and the number of intersections linked together in a given setting. However, analysing the influence of such spatial factors on spatial knowledge acquisition of people using mobile navigation system has received little attention. This thesis has two objectives, firstly to compare the spatial knowledge acquisition of pedestrians who used GPS for navigation in an unfamiliar urban environment in comparison to those who navigate the same environment without assistance, non-GPS group; and secondly, to identify the spatial factors that are influential on their spatial knowledge acquisition. To this end, this thesis firstly discusses the research background on studying the effects of using mobile maps on people’s spatial knowledge acquisition as well as the intersection of spatial factors and spatial knowledge acquisition in navigation. The thesis then compares spatial knowledge acquisition among GPS and non-GPS groups, that have been through the study site, by using the method of sketch map drawing. Furthermore, the thesis examines the association between the extent to which the elements of the physical environment, specifically, landmarks, paths, and nodes are depicted correctly in the sketch maps amongst the two groups and their physical- spatial features in real world. The degree of depiction correctness of each element in the sketch maps are then examined for paths in relation to the path length and the number of turns along them in the real world as well as the existence of internal/external landmarks long the path; for nodes, they were tested in relation to the number of the node-legs, and existence of landmarks at their corners; for landmarks, their visibility to the participant in the site was tested. Also, a photo recognition test was used as a method to assess the two groups’ (GPS, and non-GPS) visual knowledge of the site. A correlational study was then conducted to determine the relationship between the visual knowledge of the participants and the physical features of the elements in the site. This study is grounded in the conceptual framework of Environment and Behaviour (E & B). Studying urban environments and their impact on residents’ spatial cognition is a subarea of E & B studies, which aims to contribute to people’s quality of life and well-being. It also can shed light on the spatial decision-making and behaviour of individuals. In practice, the applicability of cognitive studies can inform the future urban design and planning for a better living and working environment

A Proposal for Semantic Map Representation and Evaluation

Semantic mapping is the incremental process of “mapping” relevant information of the world (i.e., spatial information, temporal events, agents and actions) to a formal description supported by a reasoning engine. Current research focuses on learning the semantic of environments based on their spatial location, geometry and appearance. Many methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, but the lack of a uniform representation, as well as standard benchmarking suites, prevents their direct comparison. In this paper, we propose a standardization in the representation of semantic maps, by defining an easily extensible formalism to be used on top of metric maps of the environments. Based on this, we describe the procedure to build a dataset (based on real sensor data) for benchmarking semantic mapping techniques, also hypothesizing some possible evaluation metrics. Nevertheless, by providing a tool for the construction of a semantic map ground truth, we aim at the contribution of the scientific community in acquiring data for populating the dataset

Interactive semantic mapping: Experimental evaluation

Robots that are launched in the consumer market need to provide more effective human robot interaction, and, in particular, spoken language interfaces. However, in order to support the execution of high level commands as they are specified in natural language, a semantic map is required. Such a map is a representation that enables the robot to ground the commands into the actual places and objects located in the environment. In this paper, we present the experimental evaluation of a system specifically designed to build semantically rich maps, through the interaction with the user. The results of the experiments not only provide the basis for a discussion of the features of the proposed approach, but also highlight the manifold issues that arise in the evaluation of semantic mapping

Conceptual spatial representations for indoor mobile robots

We present an approach for creating conceptual representations of human-made indoor environments using mobile robots. The concepts refer to spatial and functional properties of typical indoor environments. Following findings in cognitive psychology, our model is composed of layers representing maps at different levels of abstraction. The complete system is integrated in a mobile robot endowed with laser and vision sensors for place and object recognition. The system also incorporates a linguistic framework that actively supports the map acquisition process, and which is used for situated dialogue. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the integrated system

Technology Integration around the Geographic Information: A State of the Art

One of the elements that have popularized and facilitated the use of geographical information on a variety of computational applications has been the use of Web maps; this has opened new research challenges on different subjects, from locating places and people, the study of social behavior or the analyzing of the hidden structures of the terms used in a natural language query used for locating a place. However, the use of geographic information under technological features is not new, instead it has been part of a development and technological integration process. This paper presents a state of the art review about the application of geographic information under different approaches: its use on location based services, the collaborative user participation on it, its contextual-awareness, its use in the Semantic Web and the challenges of its use in natural languge queries. Finally, a prototype that integrates most of these areas is presented