Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Perceptual Anchoring

In this work we report results on the use of symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) for perceptual anchoring. Anchoring is the creation and maintenance of a connection between the symbolic and perceptual description that refer to the same physical object in the environment. We extend the anchoring framework to manage the symbolic information in a KRR system, and to exploit this knowledge and the inference mechanism to recover from failures in the anchoring of symbols. We show a simulated scenario where the system communicates with a user to interactively resolve an ambiguous description using the knowledge base, and in particular spatial relations. This is a first step towards a KRR-supported anchoring framework that we will use for human-robot communication.