Context in Robotics and Information Fusion

Robotics systems need to be robust and adaptable to multiple operational conditions, in order to be deployable in different application domains. Contextual knowledge can be used for achieving greater flexibility and robustness in tackling the main tasks of a robot, namely mission execution, adaptability to environmental conditions, and self-assessment of performance. In this chapter, we review the research work focusing on the acquisition, management, and deployment of contextual information in robotic systems. Our aim is to show that several uses of contextual knowledge (at different representational levels) have been proposed in the literature, regarding many tasks that are typically required for mobile robots. As a result of this survey, we analyze which notions and approaches are applicable to the design and implementation of architectures for information fusion. More specifically, we sketch an architectural framework which enables for an effective engineering of systems that use contextual knowledge, by including the acquisition, representation, and use of contextual information into a framework for information fusion.