Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data: Preliminary Report

Abstract

Anchoring is the process of creating and maintaining the correspondence between symbols and percepts that refer to the same physical objects. Although this process must necessarily be present in any physically embedded system that includes a symbolic component (e.g., an autonomous robot), no systematic study of anchoring as a problem per se has been reported in the literature on intelligent systems. In this paper, we propose a domain-independent definition of the anchoring problem, and identify its three basic functionalities: find, reacquire, and track. We illustrate our definition on two systems operating in two different domains: an unmanned airborne vehicle for traffic surveillance; and a mobile robot for office navigation.