Page 123 - Dynamic Vision for Perception and Control of Motion

3.6 Growth Potential of the Concept, Outlook 107

3.5 Situation Assessment and Decision-Making

Subjects differ from objects (proper) in that they have perceptual impressions from
the environment and the capability of decision-making with respect to their control
options. For subjects, a control term appears in the differential equation constraints
on their motion activities, which allows them to influence their motion; this makes
subjects basically different from objects.
If decisions on control selection are not implicitly given in the code implement-
ing subject behavior, but may be made according to some explicit goal criteria,
something like free will occurs in the behavior decision process of the subject. Be-
cause of the fundamentally new properties of subjects, these require separate meth-
ods for knowledge representation and for combining this knowledge with actual
perception to achieve their goals in an optimal fashion (however defined). The col-
lection of all facts of relevance for decision-making is called the situation. It is es-
pecially difficult if other subjects, who also may behave at will to achieve their
goals, form part of this process; these behaviors are unknown, usually, but may be
guessed sometimes from reasoning as for own decision-making.
Some expectations for future behavior of other subjects can be derived from try-
ing to understand the situation as it might look for oneself in the situation supposed
to be given for the other subject. At the moment, this is beyond the actual state of
the art of autonomous systems. But the methods under development for the sub-
ject’s decision-making will open up this avenue. In the long run, capabilities of
situation assessment of other subjects may be a decisive factor in the development
of really intelligent systems. Subjects may group together, striving for common
goals; this interesting field of group behavior taking real-world constraints into ac-
count is even further out in the future than individual behavior. But there is no
doubt that the methods will become available in the long run.

3.6 Growth Potential of the Concept, Outlook

The concept of subjects characterized by their capabilities in sensory perception, in
data processing (taking large knowledge bases for object/subject recognition and
situation assessment into account), in decision-making and planning as well as in
behavior generation is very general. Through an explicit representation of these ca-
pabilities, avenues for developing autonomous agents with new mental capabilities
of learning and cooperation in teams may open up. In preparation for this long-
term goal, representing humans with all their diverse capabilities in this framework
should be a good exercise. This is especially valuable for mixed teams of humans
and autonomous vehicles as well as for generating intelligent behavior of these ve-
hicles in environments abounding with activities of humans, which will be the
standard case in traffic situations.
In road traffic, other subjects frequently encountered (at least in rural environ-
ments) beside humans are four-legged animals of different sizes: horses, cattle,