ABSTRACT
An autonomous robot must be able to perceive its environment and act on it to achieve its goal. Sensors provide the robot with measurements about some physical phenomena. In some cases, these measurements are enough to make decisions, but at most of the time it is necessary to process these data to obtain more useful information about the environment. This process is called perception (Jones and Flynn 1993). The main information obtained by perception is the state, which is the representation of the environment and robot itself at some point of time. The robot’s state would consist of what the robot is able to sense, process, and represent. For example, the state of a mobile robot will normally consist of a map of its environment, its position in the environment, its speed, its battery level, and so on.
