Ontology-based methods for enhancing autonomous vehicle path planning

• Published in: Robotics and autonomous systems 2004-11, Vol.49 (1), p.123-133
• Main Authors: Provine, Ron, Schlenoff, Craig, Balakirsky, Stephen, Smith, Scott, Uschold, Mike
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 4D/RCS; Agent architectures; Autonomous vehicle; Description logic; Obstacle theory; Ontology; Path planning; Protégé
• ISSN: 0921-8890; 1872-793X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2004.07.020

We report the results of a first implementation demonstrating the use of an ontology to support reasoning about obstacles to improve the capabilities and performance of on-board route planning for autonomous vehicles. This is part of an overall effort to evaluate the performance of ontologies in different components of an autonomous vehicle within the 4D/RCS system architecture developed at NIST. Our initial focus has been on simple roadway driving scenarios where the controlled vehicle encounters potential obstacles in its path. As reported elsewhere [C. Schlenoff, S. Balakirsky, M. Uschold, R. Provine, S. Smith, Using ontologies to aid navigation planning in autonomous vehicles, Knowledge Engineering Review 18 (3) (2004) 243–255], our approach is to develop an ontology of objects in the environment, in conjunction with rules for estimating the damage that would be incurred by collisions with different objects in different situations. Automated reasoning is used to estimate collision damage; this information is fed to the route planner to help it decide whether to plan to avoid the object. We describe the results of the first implementation that integrates the ontology, the reasoner and the planner. We describe our insights and lessons learned and discuss resulting changes to our approach.