Environment Models and Information Assimilation

An autonomous intelligent agent working in a real, unstructured, dynamic environment must have very close interactions among its perceptual, cognitive, and motor components. We believe that by placing the environment model at the heart of these systems this interaction can be facilitated significantly. In our approach, the environment model is responsible for interaction among different components, providing temporal coherence, combining information from multiple sensors, and the purposive behaviour of the system. The information about the environment is acquired by using multiple disparate sensors, from multiple viewpoints, and at multiple time instants. We believe that the combination of information from disparate sensors should be viewed as a problem in information assimilation, rather than sensor integration. The focus in information assimilation is on the physical world being modeled, sensory information is just a means to the end. Sensor integration treats the goal implicitly, misplacing the focus on the processing of sensed information.