Rice-obot 1: An intelligent autonomous mobile robot

The Rice-obot I is the first in a series of Intelligent Autonomous Mobile Robots (IAMRs) being developed at Rice University's Cooperative Intelligent Mobile Robots (CIMR) lab. The Rice-obot I is mainly designed to be a testbed for various robotic and AI techniques, and a platform for developing intelligent control systems for exploratory robots. Researchers present the need for a generalized environment capable of combining all of the control, sensory and knowledge systems of an IAMR. They introduce Lisp-Nodes as such a system, and develop the basic concepts of nodes, messages and classes. Furthermore, they show how the control system of the Rice-obot I is implemented as sub-systems in Lisp-Nodes

MIT Mobile Robots - What's Next?

The MIT Mobile Robot Project began in January of 1985 with the objective of building machines that could operate autonomously and robustly in dynamically changing environments. We now have four working robots, each progressively more intelligent and sophisticated. All incorporate some rather novel ideas about how to build a control system that can adequately deal with complex environments. The project has also contributed some innovative and creative technical solutions in terms of putting together sensors, actuators, power supplies and processing power into whole systems that actually work. From our experiences over the past two and a half years, we have gained insight into the real issues and problems and what the goals should be for future robotics research. This paper gives our perspectives on mobile robotics: our objectives, experiences, mistakes and future plans.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Sensor-based distributed control scheme for mobile robots

Journal ArticleIn this paper we present a sensor-based distributed control scheme for mobile robots. This scheme combines centralized and decentralized control strategies. A server-client model is used to implement this scheme where the server is a process that caries out the commands to be executed, and each client is a process with a certain task. The clients are running in parallel issuing commands to the server which selects the command to be executed based on a predefined priority scheme. In this scheme, a collision avoidance client is running all the time with the highest priority. This improves the performance of the other clients since it removes the burden of avoiding obstacles and allows each client to concentrate on performing its task. The logical sensor approach is used to model the sensory system which provides different levels of data representation with tolerance measures and analysis. The simulation results of this model are presented with a brief discussion and conclusion on these results

Building Brains for Bodies

We describe a project to capitalize on newly available levels of computational resources in order to understand human cognition. We will build an integrated physical system including vision, sound input and output, and dextrous manipulation, all controlled by a continuously operating large scale parallel MIMD computer. The resulting system will learn to "think'' by building on its bodily experiences to accomplish progressively more abstract tasks. Past experience suggests that in attempting to build such an integrated system we will have to fundamentally change the way artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy think about the organization of intelligence. We expect to be able to better reconcile the theories that will be developed with current work in neuroscience

Human Management of the Hierarchical System for the Control of Multiple Mobile Robots

In order to take advantage of autonomous robotic systems, and yet ensure successful completion of all feasible tasks, we propose a mediation hierarchy in which an operator can interact at all system levels. Robotic systems are not robust in handling un-modeled events. Reactive behaviors may be able to guide the robot back into a modeled state and to continue. Reasoning systems may simply fail. Once a system has failed it is difficult to re-start the task from the failed state. Rather, the rule base is revised, programs altered, and the task re-tried from the beginning

Vector Field Driven Design for Lightweight Signal Processing and Control Schemes for Autonomous Robotic Navigation

We address the problem of realizing lightweight signal processing and control architectures for agents in multirobot systems. Motivated by the promising results of neuromorphic engineering which suggest the efficacy of analog as an implementation substrate for computation, we present the design of an analog-amenable signal processing scheme. We use control and dynamical systems theory both as a description language and as a synthesis toolset to rigorously develop our computational machinery; these mechanisms are mated with structural insights from behavior-based robotics to compose overall algorithmic architectures. Our perspective is that robotic behaviors consist of actions taken by an agent to cause its sensory perception of the environment to evolve in a desired manner. To provide an intuitive aid for designing these behavioral primitives we present a novel visual tool, inspired vector field design, that helps the designer to exploit the dynamics of the environment. We present simulation results and animation videos to demonstrate the signal processing and control architecture in action

Feasibility Evaluation of Milling Designs Using Multi-Agent Systems

During product development, many decisions have to be made that affect the entire product life cycle and often lead to errors that cause additional effort. To proactively support the engineer in evaluating his design in a CAD program, in this paper an approach to evaluate milling designs using a multi-agent system (MAS) is presented. The CommonKADS method is used and the MAS is validated against an application example of a gearbox housing that has been checked for design guidelines, standards, and tool or machine portfolios

Literature Review For Networking And Communication Technology

Report documents the results of a literature search performed in the area of networking and communication technology

Robot construction kit

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1999.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-76).by Edwin W. Foo.M.Eng