Welcome

Overview of R3-[Q-Shape] 'Reasoning about Paths, Shapes, and Configurations'

The R3-[Q-Shape] project is part of the transregional collaborative research center SFB/TR 8 'Spatial Cognition' funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Its goal is the development of qualitative high-level representation and reasoning methods for cognitive agents operating in a spatial environment and communicating about space. The project started in January 2003 and is currently in its third and last funding phase which will last until end of 2014. In the current funding phase the project is lead by Dr. Diedrich Wolter, Prof. Christian Freksa, Ph.D. and Dr.-Ing. Frank Dylla.

Research goals in brief

We pursue the development of techniques to efficiently and robustly solve complex spatial tasks and aim at advancing formal techniques to real-world problems. In particular, we investigate techniques of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning (spatial logics) to obtain an adequate level of abstraction and effective means for a task at hand. We develop knowledge representations that support a wide range of reasoning tasks ranging from classical inference to navigation, conflict resolution, and beyond.

We complement theoretical research by developing the spatial reasoning toolbox SparQ. We use our robots to study navigation techniques and we are particularly interested in rule-compliant navigation in sea traffic including robotic sailing.

planning a sailing course	SparQ verifying a qualitative constraint calculus	one of our robots inspecting a warehouse