Goal accomplishment tracking for automatic supervision of plan execution

It is common practice to break down plans into a series of goals or sub-goals in order to facilitate plan execution, thereby only burdening the individual agents responsible for their execution with small, easily achievable objectives at any one time, or providing a simple way of sharing these objectives amongst a group of these agents. Ensuring that plans are executed correctly is an essential part of any team management. To allow proper tracking of an agent's progress through a pre-planned set of goals, it is imperative to keep track of which of these goals have already been accomplished. This centralised approach is essential when the agent is part of a team of humans and/or robots, and goal accomplishment is not always being tracked at a low level. This paper presents a framework for an automated supervision system to keep track of changes in world states so as to chart progress through a pre-planned set of goals. An implementation of this framework on a mobile service robot is presented, and applied in an experiment which demonstrates its feasibility

Assigned responsibility for remote robot operation

The remote control of robots, known as teleoperation, is a non-trivial task, requiring the operator to make decisions based on the information relayed by the robot about its own status as well as its surroundings. This places the operator under significant cognitive load. A solution to this involves sharing this load between the human operator and automated operators. This paper builds on the idea of adjustable autonomy, proposing Assigned Responsibility, a way of clearly delimiting control responsibility over one or more robots between human and automated operators. An architecture for implementing Assigned Responsibility is presented

Adaptive planning for distributed systems using goal accomplishment tracking

Goal accomplishment tracking is the process of monitoring the progress of a task or series of tasks towards completing a goal. Goal accomplishment tracking is used to monitor goal progress in a variety of domains, including workflow processing, teleoperation and industrial manufacturing. Practically, it involves the constant monitoring of task execution, analysis of this data to determine the task progress and notification of interested parties. This information is usually used in a passive way to observe goal progress. However, responding to this information may prevent goal failures. In addition, responding proactively in an opportunistic way can also lead to goals being completed faster. This paper proposes an architecture to support the adaptive planning of tasks for fault tolerance or opportunistic task execution based on goal accomplishment tracking. It argues that dramatically increased performance can be gained by monitoring task execution and altering plans dynamically

Standardized field testing of assistant robots in a Mars-like environment

Controlled testing on standard tasks and within standard environments can provide meaningful performance comparisons between robots of heterogeneous design. But because they must perform practical tasks in unstructured, and therefore non-standard, environments, the benefits of this approach have barely begun to accrue for field robots. This work describes a desert trial of six student prototypes of astronaut-support robots using a set of standardized engineering tests developed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), along with three operational tests in natural Mars-like terrain. The results suggest that standards developed for emergency response robots are also applicable to the astronaut support domain, yielding useful insights into the differences in capabilities between robots and real design improvements. The exercise shows the value of combining repeatable engineering tests with task-specific application-testing in the field

To what extent does severity of loneliness vary among different mental health diagnostic groups: A cross-sectional study.

Loneliness is a common and debilitating problem in individuals with mental health disorders. However, our knowledge on severity of loneliness in different mental health diagnostic groups and factors associated with loneliness is poor, thus limiting the ability to target and improve loneliness interventions. The current study investigated the association between diagnoses and loneliness and explored whether psychological and social factors were related to loneliness. This study employed a cross-sectional design using data from a completed study which developed a measure of social inclusion. It included 192 participants from secondary, specialist mental health services with a primary diagnosis of psychotic disorders (n = 106), common mental disorders (n = 49), or personality disorders (n = 37). The study explored differences in loneliness between these broad diagnostic groups, and the relationship to loneliness of: affective symptoms, social isolation, perceived discrimination, and internalized stigma. The study adhered to the STROBE checklist for observational research. People with common mental disorders (MD = 3.94, CI = 2.15 to 5.72, P < 0.001) and people with personality disorders (MD = 4.96, CI = 2.88 to 7.05, P < 0.001) reported higher levels of loneliness compared to people with psychosis. These differences remained significant after adjustment for all psychological and social variables. Perceived discrimination and internalized stigma were also independently associated with loneliness and substantially contributed to a final explanatory model. The severity of loneliness varies between different mental health diagnostic groups. Both people with common mental disorders and personality disorders reported higher levels of loneliness than people with psychosis. Addressing perceived mental health discrimination and stigma may help to reduce loneliness

Reactor antineutrino spectra and their application to antineutrino-induced reactions. II

The antineutrino and electron spectra associated with various nuclear fuels are calculated. While there are substantial differences between the spectra of different uranium and plutonium isotopes, the dependence on the energy and flux of the fission-inducing neutrons is very weak. The resulting spectra can be used for the calculation of the antineutrino and electron spectra of an arbitrary nuclear reactor at various stages of its refueling cycle. The sources of uncertainties in the spectrum are identified and analyzed in detail. The exposure time dependence of the spectrum is also discussed. The averaged cross sections of the inverse neutron β decay, weak charged and neutral-current-induced deuteron disintegration, and the antineutrino-electron scattering are then evaluated using the resulting ν̅_e spectra. [RADIOACTIVITY, FISSION 235U, 238U, (^239)Pu, (^240)Pu, (^241)Pu, antineutrino and electron spectra calculated. σ for ν̅ induced reactions analyzed.

Dynamical N-body Equlibrium in Circular Dilaton Gravity

We obtain a new exact equilibrium solution to the N-body problem in a one-dimensional relativistic self-gravitating system. It corresponds to an expanding/contracting spacetime of a circle with N bodies at equal proper separations from one another around the circle. Our methods are straightforwardly generalizable to other dilatonic theories of gravity, and provide a new class of solutions to further the study of (relativistic) one-dimensional self-gravitating systems.Comment: 4 pages, latex, reference added, minor changes in wordin

Statistical Mechanics of Relativistic One-Dimensional Self-Gravitating Systems

We consider the statistical mechanics of a general relativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating system. The system consists of $N$-particles coupled to lineal gravity and can be considered as a model of $N$ relativistically interacting sheets of uniform mass. The partition function and one-particle distitrubion functions are computed to leading order in $1/c$ where $c$ is the speed of light; as $c\to\infty$ results for the non-relativistic one-dimensional self-gravitating system are recovered. We find that relativistic effects generally cause both position and momentum distribution functions to become more sharply peaked, and that the temperature of a relativistic gas is smaller than its non-relativistic counterpart at the same fixed energy. We consider the large-N limit of our results and compare this to the non-relativistic case.Comment: latex, 60 pages, 22 figure

Dilaton Gravity with a Non-minmally Coupled Scalar Field

We discuss the two-dimensional dilaton gravity with a scalar field as the source matter. The coupling between the gravity and the scalar, massless, field is presented in an unusual form. We work out two examples of these couplings and solutions with black-hole behaviour are discussed and compared with those found in the literature