Spatio-Temporal Reasoning about Traffic Scenarios

A model of spatial relations between automobiles changing over time needs to trade off expressivity, computational com-plexity, type of measured data, and closeness to human cogni-tion. We present a common sense theory for reasoning about distances between cars based on two temporal distances be-tween pairs of cars, net time gap and time to collision. We give an axiomatization in the situation calculus which allows reasoning about car-to-car relations and how they are affected by time and acceleration. We also discuss experimental re-sults in a plan recognition scenario