A stream-based hierarchical anchoring framework

Autonomous systems situated in the real world often need to recognize, track, and reason about various types of physical objects. In order to allow reasoning at a symbolic level, one must create and continuously maintain a correlation between symbols labeling physical objects and the sensor data being collected about them, a process called anchoring. In this paper we present a stream-based hierarchical anchoring framework extending the DyKnow knowledge processing middleware. A classification hierarchy is associated with expressive conditions for hypothesizing the type and identity of an object given streams of temporally tagged sensor data. The anchoring process constructs and maintains a set of object linkage structures representing the best possible hypotheses at any time. Each hypothesis can be incrementally generalized or narrowed down as new sensor data arrives. Symbols can be associated with an object at any level of classification, permitting symbolic reasoning on different levels of abstraction. The approach has been applied to a traffic monitoring application where an unmanned aerial vehicle collects information about a small urban area in order to detect traffic violations.