Can agents without concepts think? an investigation using a knowledge based system

Grid-World is a working computer model which has been used to investigate the search capabilities of artificial agents that understand the world in terms of non-conceptual content. The results from this model show that the non-conceptual agent outperformed the stimulus response agent, and both were outperformed by the conceptual agent. This result provides quantitative evidence to support the theoretical argument that animals and pre-linguistic children may use non-conceptual content to understand the world. Modelling these ideas in an artificial environment provides an opportunity for a new approach to artificial intelligence

Tracking a table tennis ball for umpiring purposes using a multi-agent system

Tracking a table tennis ball for umpiring purposes is a challenging task as, in real-match scenarios, the ball travels fast and can become occluded or merged with other background objects. This paper presents the design of a multi-view based tracking system that can overcome the challenges of tracking a ball in real match sequences. The system has been tested on a complete table tennis rally and the results are very promising. The system is able to continuously track the ball with only marginal variations in detection. Furthermore, the initialization of the multi-camera system means it is both a portable and cost-effective solution for umpiring purposes

Time series forecasting using a TSK fuzzy system tuned with simulated annealing

In this paper, a combination of a Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy system (TSK) and simulated annealing is used to predict well known time series by searching for the best configuration of the fuzzy system. Simulated annealing is used to optimise the parameters of the antecedent and the consequent parts of the fuzzy system rules. The results of the proposed method are encouraging indicating that simulated annealing and fuzzy logic are able to combine well in time series prediction

Tracking a table tennis ball for umpiring purposes

This study investigates tracking a table-tennis ball rapidly from video captured using low-cost equipment for umpiring purposes. A number of highly efficient algorithms have been developed for this purpose. The proposed system was tested using sequences capture from real match scenes. The preliminary results of experiments show that accurate and rapid tracking can be achieved even under challenging conditions, including occlusion and colour merging. This work can contribute to the development of an automatic umpiring system and also has the potential to provide amateur users open access to a detection tool for fast-moving, small, round objects

Robustness analysis of evolutionary controller tuning using real systems

A genetic algorithm (GA) presents an excellent method for controller parameter tuning. In our work, we evolved the heading as well as the altitude controller for a small lightweight helicopter. We use the real flying robot to evaluate the GA's individuals rather than an artificially consistent simulator. By doing so we avoid the ldquoreality gaprdquo, taking the controller from the simulator to the real world. In this paper we analyze the evolutionary aspects of this technique and discuss the issues that need to be considered for it to perform well and result in robust controllers

Real-time evolution of an embedded controller for an autonomous helicopter

In this paper we evolve the parameters of a proportional, integral, and derivative (PID) controller for an unstable, complex and nonlinear system. The individuals of the applied genetic algorithm (GA) are evaluated on the actual system rather than on a simulation of it, thus avoiding the ldquoreality gaprdquo. This makes implicit a formal model identification for the implementation of a simulator. This also calls for the GA to be approached in an unusual way, where we need to consider new aspects not normally present in the usual situations using an unnaturally consistent simulator for fitness evaluation. Although elitism is used in the GAs, no monotonic increase in fitness is exhibited by the algorithm. Instead, we show that the GApsilas individuals converge towards more robust solutions

Web Usage Mining with Evolutionary Extraction of Temporal Fuzzy Association Rules

In Web usage mining, fuzzy association rules that have a temporal property can provide useful knowledge about when associations occur. However, there is a problem with traditional temporal fuzzy association rule mining algorithms. Some rules occur at the intersection of fuzzy sets' boundaries where there is less support (lower membership), so the rules are lost. A genetic algorithm (GA)-based solution is described that uses the flexible nature of the 2-tuple linguistic representation to discover rules that occur at the intersection of fuzzy set boundaries. The GA-based approach is enhanced from previous work by including a graph representation and an improved fitness function. A comparison of the GA-based approach with a traditional approach on real-world Web log data discovered rules that were lost with the traditional approach. The GA-based approach is recommended as complementary to existing algorithms, because it discovers extra rules. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Supervised Control of a Flying Performing Robot using its Intrinsic Sound

We present the current results of our ongoing research in achieving efficient control of a flying robot for a wide variety of possible applications. A lightweight small indoor helicopter has been equipped with an embedded system and relatively simple sensors to achieve autonomous stable flight. The controllers have been tuned using genetic algorithms to further enhance flight stability. A number of additional sensors would need to be attached to the helicopter to enable it to sense more of its environment such as its current location or the location of obstacles like the walls of the room it is flying in. The lightweight nature of the helicopter very much restricts the amount of sensors that can be attached to it. We propose utilising the intrinsic sound signatures of the helicopter to locate it and to extract features about its current state, using another supervising robot. The analysis of this information is then sent back to the helicopter using an uplink to enable the helicopter to further stabilise its flight and correct its position and flight path without the need for additional sensors

A new splitting-based displacement prediction approach for location-based services

In location-based services (LBSs), the service is provided based on the users' locations through location determination and mobility realization. Several location prediction models have been proposed to enhance and increase the relevance of the information retrieved by users of mobile information systems, but none of them studied the relationship between accuracy rate of prediction and the performance of the model in terms of consuming resources and constraints of mobile devices. Most of the current location prediction research is focused on generalized location models, where the geographic extent is divided into regular-shape cells. These models are not suitable for certain LBSs where the objectives are to compute and present on-road services. One such technique is the Prediction Location Model (PLM), which deals with inner cell structure. The PLM technique suffers from memory usage and poor accuracy. The main goal of this paper is to propose a new path prediction technique for Location-Based Services. The new approach is competitive and more efficient compared to PLM regarding measurements such as accuracy rate of location prediction and memory usage

Managing uncertainty in sound based control for an autonomous helicopter

In this paper we present our ongoing research using a multi-purpose, small and low cost autonomous helicopter platform (Flyper ). We are building on previously achieved stable control using evolutionary tuning. We propose a sound based supervised method to localise the indoor helicopter and extract meaningful information to enable the helicopter to further stabilise its flight and correct its flightpath. Due to the high amount of uncertainty in the data, we propose the use of fuzzy logic in the signal processing of the sound signature. We discuss the benefits and difficulties using type-1 and type-2 fuzzy logic in this real-time systems and give an overview of our proposed system