Advanced Airflow Modelling Using Naive Physics for Odour Localisation

To date, robotics has had limited success at operating in unstructured environments. Part of the problem is the lack of commonsense reasoning. One area of commonsense reasoning is Naive Physics, the practice of using intuitive rules to reason about the physical environment. Researchers have explored relevant philosophical issues, attempted to develop logical 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 airflow, 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 encapsulating naive rules, which represents a broader and more practical approach to naive physics.