An AI planning-based tool for scheduling satellite nominal operations

Satellite domains are becoming a fashionable area of research within the AI community due to the complexity of the problems that satellite domains need to solve. With the current U.S. and European focus on launching satellites for communication, broadcasting, or localization tasks, among others, the automatic control of these machines becomes an important problem. Many new techniques in both the planning and scheduling fields have been applied successfully, but still much work is left to be done for reliable autonomous architectures. The purpose of this article is to present CONSAT, a real application that plans and schedules the performance of nominal operations in four satellites during the course of a year for a commercial Spanish satellite company, HISPASAT. For this task, we have used an AI domain-independent planner that solves the planning and scheduling problems in the HISPASAT domain thanks to its capability of representing and handling continuous variables, coding functions to obtain the operators' variable values, and the use of control rules to prune the search. We also abstract the approach in order to generalize it to other domains that need an integrated approach to planning and scheduling.Publicad

Cooperación Iberoamericana a través de la Educación Científica

Se presentan, de forma muy resumida, algunas de las actividades de cooperación iberoamericana realizadas a través de la Cátedra UNESCO de Educación Científica para América Latina y el Caribe, con el objetivo principal de incentivar y apoyar, la innovación pedagógica en el ámbito de la educación superior

Environment-Aware Postural Control of Virtual Humans for Real-time Applications

Interactive control of a virtual character through full body movement has a wide range of applications. However, there is a need for systems that accurately reproduce the motion of a performer while accounting for surrounding obstacles. We propose an approach based on an efficient Prioritized Inverse Kinematics constraint solver. The inputs to the system are the acquired positions of relevant body parts. These positions are tracked by the virtual character thanks to a set of kinematic constraints. At the same time a special constraint, which we call “observer”, is attached to body parts that must be checked for collisions. An observer acts by smoothly damping the motion of its controlled body part towards nearby obstacles, thus preventing future collisions from taking place

Accurate On-line Avatar Control with Collision Anticipation

Interactive control of a virtual character through full body movement has a wide range of applications. However, there is a need for systems that accurately reproduce the motion of a performer while accounting for surrounding obstacles. We propose an approach based on a Prioritized Inverse Kinematics constraint solver. Several markers are placed on the user's body. A set of kinematic constraints make the virtual character track these markers. At the same time, we monitor the instantaneous displacements of a set of geometric primitives, called observers, attached to different parts of the virtual character. When an observer enters the influence area of an obstacle, its motion is damped by means of automatically created preventive constraints. The IK solver satisfies both maker and preventive constraints simultaneously, yielding postures of the virtual character that remain close to those of the user, while avoiding collisions with the virtual environment. Our performance measurements show the maturity of the IK technology for real-time full-body interactions

Full-Body Avatar Control with Environment Awareness

Interactive control of virtual characters through full-body movement requires accurately reproducing a performer's motion while accounting for surrounding obstacles. The authors' approach, based on a prioritized inverse kinematics solver, satisfies marker and preventive constraints simultaneously. Together with a coupled spine model, it yields virtual character postures that are close to the performer's