SailAway: Spatial Cognition in Sea Navigation

Rules play an important role in everyday human interaction. In road traffic the participants have to obey to the rules to guarantee smooth traffic flow and to avoid accidents. The participants in these situations are called agents. Artificial agents that act in this environment must be aware of these rules and must act accordingly. Typically, such rules are formulated in natural language and thus, contain qualitative terms like “from left” or “turn right”. These terms are only intricately to implement to navigate agents. In this article we describe a so-called qualitative approach to formalize natural language spatial regulations. With the demonstrator SailAway [1] we show how the formalizations can be applied with little computational effort for collision free navigation in the domain of vessel navigation.