Using ontologies to aid navigation planning in autonomous vehicles

This paper explores the hypothesis that ontologies can be used to improve the capabilities and performance of on-board route planning for autonomous vehicles. We name a variety of general benefits that ontologies may provide, and list numerous specific ways that ontologies may be used in different components of our chosen infrastructure: the 4D/RCS system architecture developed at NIST. Our initial focus is on simple roadway driving scenarios where the controlled vehicle encounters objects in its path. Our approach is to develop an ontology of objects in the environment, in conjunction with rules for estimating the damage that would be incurred by collisions with the different objects in different situations. Automated reasoning is used to estimate collision damage; this information is fed to the route planner to help it decide whether to avoid the object. We describe our current experiments and plans for future work.