Engineering Artificial Intelligence: A Spatial Representation and Reasoning Perspective

Spatial information can be represented in many different ways. There are quantitative representations such as GPS coordinates or qualitative representations such as "Turn left at the sign". Many applications require reasoning about both kinds of information. However, the state of the art in the field does not support such a rich reasoning framework. Indeed, combining qualitative and quantitative spatial information seamlessly is a major scientific challenge. We address this challenge and develop general methods to integrate different spatial representations and efficient procedures for reasoning about this unifiled information. Our methods will enable a simple, engineering-style usage of spatial information for real-world applications.