605 research outputs found
From one to many: recent work on truth
In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here
Active vision for dexterous grasping of novel objects
How should a robot direct active vision so as to ensure reliable grasping? We
answer this question for the case of dexterous grasping of unfamiliar objects.
By dexterous grasping we simply mean grasping by any hand with more than two
fingers, such that the robot has some choice about where to place each finger.
Such grasps typically fail in one of two ways, either unmodeled objects in the
scene cause collisions or object reconstruction is insufficient to ensure that
the grasp points provide a stable force closure. These problems can be solved
more easily if active sensing is guided by the anticipated actions. Our
approach has three stages. First, we take a single view and generate candidate
grasps from the resulting partial object reconstruction. Second, we drive the
active vision approach to maximise surface reconstruction quality around the
planned contact points. During this phase, the anticipated grasp is continually
refined. Third, we direct gaze to improve the safety of the planned reach to
grasp trajectory. We show, on a dexterous manipulator with a camera on the
wrist, that our approach (80.4% success rate) outperforms a randomised
algorithm (64.3% success rate).Comment: IROS 2016. Supplementary video: https://youtu.be/uBSOO6tMzw
Exploring Design Space For An Integrated Intelligent System
Understanding the trade-offs available in the design space of intelligent systems is a major unaddressed element in the study of Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we approach this problem in two ways. First, we discuss the development of our integrated robotic system in terms of its trajectory through design space. Second, we demonstrate the practical implications of architectural design decisions by using this system as an experimental platform for comparing behaviourally similar yet architecturally different systems. The results of this show that our system occupies a "sweet spot" in design space in terms of the cost of moving information between processing components
KR: An Architecture for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics
This paper describes an architecture that combines the complementary
strengths of declarative programming and probabilistic graphical models to
enable robots to represent, reason with, and learn from, qualitative and
quantitative descriptions of uncertainty and knowledge. An action language is
used for the low-level (LL) and high-level (HL) system descriptions in the
architecture, and the definition of recorded histories in the HL is expanded to
allow prioritized defaults. For any given goal, tentative plans created in the
HL using default knowledge and commonsense reasoning are implemented in the LL
using probabilistic algorithms, with the corresponding observations used to
update the HL history. Tight coupling between the two levels enables automatic
selection of relevant variables and generation of suitable action policies in
the LL for each HL action, and supports reasoning with violation of defaults,
noisy observations and unreliable actions in large and complex domains. The
architecture is evaluated in simulation and on physical robots transporting
objects in indoor domains; the benefit on robots is a reduction in task
execution time of 39% compared with a purely probabilistic, but still
hierarchical, approach.Comment: The paper appears in the Proceedings of the 15th International
Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR 2014
REBA: A Refinement-Based Architecture for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics
This paper describes an architecture for robots that combines the
complementary strengths of probabilistic graphical models and declarative
programming to represent and reason with logic-based and probabilistic
descriptions of uncertainty and domain knowledge. An action language is
extended to support non-boolean fluents and non-deterministic causal laws. This
action language is used to describe tightly-coupled transition diagrams at two
levels of granularity, with a fine-resolution transition diagram defined as a
refinement of a coarse-resolution transition diagram of the domain. The
coarse-resolution system description, and a history that includes (prioritized)
defaults, are translated into an Answer Set Prolog (ASP) program. For any given
goal, inference in the ASP program provides a plan of abstract actions. To
implement each such abstract action, the robot automatically zooms to the part
of the fine-resolution transition diagram relevant to this action. A
probabilistic representation of the uncertainty in sensing and actuation is
then included in this zoomed fine-resolution system description, and used to
construct a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The policy
obtained by solving the POMDP is invoked repeatedly to implement the abstract
action as a sequence of concrete actions, with the corresponding observations
being recorded in the coarse-resolution history and used for subsequent
reasoning. The architecture is evaluated in simulation and on a mobile robot
moving objects in an indoor domain, to show that it supports reasoning with
violation of defaults, noisy observations and unreliable actions, in complex
domains.Comment: 72 pages, 14 figure
Crossmodal content binding in information-processing architectures
Operating in a physical context, an intelligent robot faces two fundamental problems. First, it needs to combine information from its different sensors to form a representation of the environment that is more complete than any of its sensors on its own could provide. Second, it needs to combine high-level representations (such as those for planning and dialogue) with its sensory information, to ensure that the interpretations of these symbolic representations are grounded in the situated context. Previous approaches to this problem have used techniques such as (low-level) information fusion, ontological reasoning, and (high-level) concept learning. This paper presents a framework in which these, and other approaches, can be combined to form a shared representation of the current state of the robot in relation to its environment and other agents. Preliminary results from an implemented system are presented to illustrate how the framework supports behaviours commonly required of an intelligent robot
Physical simulation for monocular 3D model based tracking
The problem of model-based object tracking in three dimensions is addressed. Most previous work on tracking assumes simple motion models, and consequently tracking typically fails in a variety of situations. Our insight is that incorporating physics models of object behaviour improves tracking performance in these cases. In particular it allows us to handle tracking in the face of rigid body interactions where there is also occlusion and fast object motion. We show how to incorporate rigid body physics simulation into a particle filter. We present two methods for this based on pose and force noise. The improvements are tested on four videos of a robot pushing an object, and results indicate that our approach performs considerably better than a plain particle filter tracker, with the force noise method producing the best results over the range of test videos
A manifesto for a socio-technical approach to NHS and social care IT-enabled business change - to deliver effective high quality health and social care for all
80% of IT projects are known to fail. Adopting a socio-technical
approach will help them to succeed in the future.
The socio-technical proposition is simply that any work system comprises
both a social system (including the staff, their working practices, job roles,
culture and goals) and a technical system (the tools and technologies that
support and enable work processes). These elements together form a
single system comprising interacting parts. The technical and the social
elements need to be jointly designed (or redesigned) so that they are
congruent and support one another in delivering a better service.
Focusing on one aspect alone is likely to be sub-optimal and wastes
money (Clegg, 2008). Thus projects that just focus on the IT will almost
always fail to deliver the full benefits
Alethic desires, framing effects, and deflationism: Reply to Asay
Jamin Asay has recently argued that deflationists about the concept of truth cannot satisfactorily account for our alethic desires, i.e. those of our desires that pertain to the truth of our beliefs. In this brief reply, I show how deflationists can draw on well-established psychological findings on framing effects to explain how the concept of truth behaves within the scope of our alethic desires
The nature of disagreement: matters of taste and environs
Predicates of personal taste (PPT) have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility relation between preferences that I call type-noncotenability. This model is available to all parties in the ongoing debates about PPT, but it points up an advantage enjoyed by expressivist accounts of PPT. In closing, I consider four objections against the model that, while failing to fully undermine it, open up promising avenues of inquiry about the nature of disagreement
- …