I was surprised to see that an article I coauthored was finally published in the latest issue of Robotics and Automation Magazine. It had been so long ago that it took me a while to place the paper -- I guess it takes quite a while for a special issue to get published.

Anyway, the paper can be found here.

I was surprised to see that an article I coauthored was finally published in the latest issue of Robotics and Automation Magazine. It had been so long ago that it took me a while to place the paper -- I guess it takes quite a while for a special issue to get published.

Anyway, the paper can be found here.

I've been trying to redo some presentations about the architecture of the Distributed Field Robot Architecture. It seem that we have some interest from several groups regarding actually using it for large robotics projects. So I have been trying to clean the codebase up a little bit (amazing the cruft that develops...) and build some new presentations to explain some of the design elements behind what I have been doing.

A while back I submitted a short research outline to the AAAI Fall Symposium. It went over well enough that I have been expanding what I wrote there to continue towards my dissertation. Unfortunately, it did not scale directly; or rather, I need to restructure quite a bit to get it to scale up. So I have fallen to try to mind-map how all the bits and pieces inter-relate. I think that it has worked out rather well.

The mind-map doesn't really translate directly to an outline though. So I fell back on Tinderbox agents to help with this task. First I added a couple of simple attributes: Section and Order. Then we can use an agent to collect all the notes for a section, sorting on the Order attribute:

Since the agent is looking for notes with the section attribute that includes a given tag, we can place a note in multiple sections. The upshot is that I can now shuffle sections around just by changing two attributes and the agents automatically restructure the outline.

The downside is that I can only do this for a single level -- children of agents, but not grandchildren.

Regular readers of this site may note (all none of you), that there have been a few Tinderbox notes posted recently, and not a lot about research or robotics. I have been in the process of trying to get a proposal (PhD dissertation) put together, and that is taking up a great deal of time. Besides that I don't really want to steal my own thunder too much.

It turns out that what I am looking at is meshing in rather nicely with quite a few topics that are "hot" on the internets. Some topics of interest:

• Semantic Web technologies (particularly OWL)
• Semantic blogging (which should be of interest to Tinderbox users)
• Ontologies and semantic integration
• Robot-assisted search and rescue

How does it all fit together, you may ask? I gotta keep some secrets...

I just heard from Lefteris that he just got back from presenting his paper (well, our paper technically, but he did all the writing) at the 2005 Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation. I've updated the link to reflect the final version in the proceedings.

I think I need to start submitting to these fun overseas conferences. The AAAI Fall Symposium in Alexandria, VA will be fun and it will be good to see my Grandma, but there is something about going to Cyprus for a work conference...

As per request, I am linking to the videos that I used during the presentation. They are Windows Media, for the most part; I typically use Quicktime, but these had already been converted. YMMV

techknowledge:

[13MB WMV]

Medical Triage Sensor:

[52MB AVI]

Night Vision Sensor:

[200KB WMV, 53KB WMV, 40KB WMV]

More information, especially pictures and context, on the CRASAR Hurricane Charley page.

Other exciting clips include Aaron's work on Affective Recruitment. I did not have time to discuss it in the presentation, but it was a good exercise stressing the distributed architecture and is an interesting view:

[54MB WMV]

And finally, I touched on our use of VTOLs. We have a news clip that shows a little of our work in that area:

[4.3MB WMV]

A note on the videos: Windows Media Player will try to stream these files and most likely complain. If this happens, just download the file and it should play correctly.

I gave a presentation this morning to the Florida West Coast section. As you can see, I was primarily talking about the search and rescue group at USF, CRASAR. As per request, I am posting some copies of slides in [PDF] and [Flash]. I did this presentation in Keynote, which most people don't use, so hopefully these versions will work.

I thought the presentation went reasonably well -- no one actually fell asleep on me and I had a good question and answer session at the end. I have a few things I would like to change the next time I do this talk, which will likely be in a few months at the IEEE Sections Congress here in Tampa. I think a better approach for that venue will be a "Day in the Life of a Rescue Robot", and using this I can build a better framework for the presentation. Should be fun -- especially since the audience there will be more on the order of a thousand...

Oh, the videos that I used in the presentation were pretty massive. If anyone is interested in the media clips I used, please email me and I will see if I can dig up smaller / more compressed versions.

I'm not exactly sure why I'm writing about this at present, but I think it may have something to do with the artwork -- I'm currently reading "The Cyberiad", by Stanislaw Lem with artwork by Daniel Mróz and the books remind me of each other, although one is fiction (Lem) and the other is robotics and psychology.

I actually read Vehicles ages go in my first robotics class. It is a look at the possibilities of intelligence and evolution, showing how complex behaviors can be build up out of small pieces. The book is really laid out as a gedanken experiment -- one that is grounded in biology as the last half of the book points out. The books starts with a description of the vehicles, then proceeds to show how they might exhibit behaviors such as fear, love, and hate, learn to recognize shapes, think, plan and so on. This correlates with a paradigm in robotics called the behavioral (or reactive) paradigm, which states that complex behaviors can be built up out of the complex interaction of many simple behaviors. This is a vast simplification, so see the literature for more information.

That said, this is a great little book that is as much a meditation on though, development, psychology and evolution as it is on robotics.

Ran across this announcement:

2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective

November 3-6, 2005, Hyatt Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia

The notion of role is ubiquitous not only in many areas of artificial intelligence, but also in many other areas of computer science, like programming languages, software engineering, coordination and databases, multiagent systems, computational linguistics and conceptual modelling, and also in other scientific fields, like formal ontology, sociology, cognitive science, organizational science and linguistics.

In sociology, on the one hand roles are often described as expected behavior of entities or agents, on the other hand roles are seen also as presentations of selves. In organizational science roles encompass more formal aspects such as rights and duties.

Three different main viewpoints characterize research on roles:

• roles as named places in relationships (especially in linguistics, databases and conceptual modelling)

• roles as dynamic classification of entities (especially in programming languages and databases)

• roles as instances to be adjoined to the entities which play the role (especially in ontologies, multiagent systems and programming languages).

Undisputed distinguishing features of roles seem to be their dependence on some other entities and their dynamic character (Sowa 1984). These properties contrast roles with the notion of natural types. Natural type seems to be essential to an entity: if an entity changes its natural type, it loses its identity; in Guarino (1992)'s terms, roles lack the rigidity which natural types possess. Masolo et al. (2004) elaborate the relational nature of roles, highlighting their definitional dependence on other concepts.

Discussions on roles are important not only to have a better understanding of theories using this notion, but also from the applicative point of view. E.g., integration of ontologies, programming languages, databases, simulation can benefit from the introduction of a well founded notion of role.

However, as, e.g., Steinmann (2000) witnesses, there is no common agreement yet about what roles are, which are their properties and how they can be modelled in a uniform way in the different areas. One likely reason is that roles are discussed in very different contexts, so that interested researchers have little opportunity to meet with each other. Even if there are events where roles are discussed, they always appear as a sub-topic within the framework of more general issues (like the AOSE workshop about agent oriented software engineering, or the recent CoOrg05 workshop at Coordination05); hence, there are few venues for research integration.

With this symposium we propose to gather researchers working across the boundaries of their subfields to explore new formal and computational techniques and research methodologies for integrating research results. For this reason this symposium will provide time for discussion besides paper presentations.

[...]

roles05 PDF

Long, Matthew T., Creating a distributed field robot architecture for multiple robots. Master’s thesis, University of South Florida, November 2004. [pdf]

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a distributed robot architecture, Distributed Field Robot Architecture. The approach taken in this thesis is threefold. First, the distributed architecture builds on existing hybrid deliberative/reactive architectures used for individual robots rather than creating a distributed architecture that requires re-engineering of existing robots. Second, the distributed layer of the architecture incorporates concepts from artificial intelligence and software agents. Third, the architecture is designed around Suns Jini middleware layer, rather than creating a middleware layer from scratch or attempting to adapt a software agent architecture.

This thesis makes three primary contributions, both theoretical and practical, to intelligent robotics. First, the thesis defines key characteristics of a distributed robot architecture. Second, this thesis describes, implements, and validates a distributed robot architecture. Third, the implementation with a team of mobile ground robots interacting with an external software “mission controller” agent in a complex, outdoor task is itself a contribution.

The architecture is validated with three existence proofs. First, an example is presented to show the implementation of a basic sensor service. Second, a basic behavior is presented to validate the reactive portion of the architecture. Finally, an intelligent agent is presented to validate the deliberative layer of the architecture and describe the integration with the distributed layer.