From Active Perception to Active Cooperation Fundamental Processes of Intelligent Behavior

In the ten years since we put forward the idea of active perception (Bajcsy 1985, Bajcsy 1988) we have found that cooperative processes of various kinds and at various levels are often called for. In this paper we suggest that a proper understanding of cooperative processes will lead to a foundation for intelligent behavior and demonstrate the feasibility of this approach for some of the difficult and open problems in the understanding of intelligent behaviors

Lifeworld Analysis

We argue that the analysis of agent/environment interactions should be extended to include the conventions and invariants maintained by agents throughout their activity. We refer to this thicker notion of environment as a lifeworld and present a partial set of formal tools for describing structures of lifeworlds and the ways in which they computationally simplify activity. As one specific example, we apply the tools to the analysis of the Toast system and show how versions of the system with very different control structures in fact implement a common control structure together with different conventions for encoding task state in the positions or states of objects in the environment.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Using Automated Task Solution Synthesis to Generate Critical Junctures for Management of Planned and Reactive Cooperation between a Human-Controlled Blimp and an Autonomous Ground Robot

This thesis documents the use of an approach for automated task solution synthesis that algorithmically and automatically identifies periods during which a team of less-than-fully capable robots benefit from tightly-coupled, coordinated, cooperative behavior. I test two hypotheses: 1) That a team’s performance can be increased by cooperating during certain specific periods of a mission and 2) That these periods can be identified automatically and algorithmically. I also demonstrate how identification of cooperative periods can be performed both off-line prior to the application and reactively during mission execution. I validate these premises in a real-world experiment using a human-piloted Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an autonomous mobile robot. For this experiment I construct a UAV and use an off-the-shelf robot. To identify the cooperative periods I use the ASyMTRe task solution synthesis system, and I use the Player robot server for control tasks such as navigation and path planning. My results show that teams employing cooperative behaviors during algorithmically identified cooperative periods exhibit better performance than non-cooperative teams in a target localization task. I also present results showing an increased time cost for cooperative behaviors and compare the increased time cost of two cooperative approaches that generate cooperative periods prior to and during mission execution

Variable structure robot control systems: The RAPP approach

International audienceThis paper presents a method of designing variable structure control systems for robots. As the on-board robot computational resources are limited, but in some cases the demands imposed on the robot by the user are virtually limitless, the solution is to produce a variable structure system. The task dependent part has to be exchanged, however the task governs the activities of the robot. Thus not only exchange of some task-dependent modules is required, but also supervisory responsibilities have to be switched. Such control systems are necessary in the case of robot companions, where the owner of the robot may demand from it to provide many services.

What is Robotics: Why Do We Need It and How Can We Get It?

Robotics is an emerging synthetic science concerned with programming work. Robot technologies are quickly advancing beyond the insights of the existing science. More secure intellectual foundations will be required to achieve better, more reliable and safer capabilities as their penetration into society deepens. Presently missing foundations include the identification of fundamental physical limits, the development of new dynamical systems theory and the invention of physically grounded programming languages. The new discipline needs a departmental home in the universities which it can justify both intellectually and by its capacity to attract new diverse populations inspired by the age old human fascination with robots. For more information: Kod*la