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

Formalization of the Development Process

Introduction 14.1.1 What is development? Software development encompasses many phases including requirements engineering, specification, design, implementation, verification or testing, and maintenance. In this chapter we concentrate on the intermediate tasks: the transition from requirements specification to verified design and design optimization; in particular techniques for developing correct designs as opposed to ad hoc or a posteriori methods in which a postulated design is later verified or tested. We view software development as the composition of correctness preserving refinement steps. Hence, a development is meaningful relative to a notion of refinement and correctness. There are many such notions (e.g., Chapter 6), each defining a type of problem transformation or reduction. For example specification refinement from a specification SP to SP 0 through a refinement map ae might be defined as c

Structuring specifications in-the-large and in-the-small: higher-order functions, dependent types and inheritance in SPECTRAL

SPECTRAL is an experiment in specification language design that tries to maintain compactness in spite of a number of orthogonal concepts. The design is based on Extended ML and PROSPECTRA, generalising and extending both approaches. Of particular concern are the means for structuring specifications and programs in-thelarge and in-the-small. The language includes constructs for defining general higher-order functions yielding specifications or program modules. Concepts of subtyping and (object-oriented) inheritance are included to support the specification development process and to enhance re-usability. Much of the power of the language comes from the use of dependent types