Environment model for advanced robots

The environmental modeling aspect of intelligent robot development and research is addressed. It is argued that, at any given time, only a small portion of the robot's world model, called the environment, is used by the robot in its operation and that the environment model at a given instant should contain more detailed and explicit task-oriented information. The ultimate modeling scheme should consist of hierarchical decompositions on various scales such as a resolution scale and an abstraction scale. Issues in designing such an environment model, which will facilitate reasoning in uncertain environments for robots equipped with multiple sensors with disparate characteristics, have been investigated.<>