Advanced airflow modelling using naive physics for odour localisation

To date, robotics has had limited success at op- erating in unstructured environments. Part of the problem is the lack of commonsense rea- soning. One area of commonsense reasoning is Naive Physics, the practice of using intu- itive rules to reason about the physical envi- ronment. Researchers have explored relevant philosophical issues, attempted to develop log- ical formalisations, and developed systems to 'understand' and learn simple physical/spatial qualities of physical objects. This paper reports the implementation of an algorithm that uses Naive Physics to model air∞ow, and has been used on a practical robot for the task of odour localisation. This is an example of a Naive Reasoning Machine, an algorithm encapsulat- ing naive rules, which represents a broader and more practical approach to naive physics.