Qualitative Spatial Reasoning with Oriented Point Relation in 3D Space

Among qualitative direction relation models, Oriented point relation algebra (OPRAm) is a remarkable model for robot navigation with uncertain direction information. It has great advantages in providing powerful expressions with very limited information compared with other point-based spatial relation models. The original OPRAm is defined in 2D space, and its model and reasoning algorithm are found not applicable in 3D space. We proposed a novel direction relation model named OPRA3Dm to extend the original OPRAm to 3D space, and presented a new reasoning algorithm on Oriented point relation algebra in three dimension (OPRA3Dm). A further study was carried out for composition reasoning on OPRA3Dm. The proposed reasoning algorithm will deduce new information which cannot be directly detected by hardware. The experiment showed the algorithm had some practical significance, it can be applied to the Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation and similar scenarios.