Ancient accounting

In an article entitled, Does the Bible Exaggerate King Solomon\u27s Golden Wealth?, Alan R. Millard [Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1989, pp 20-34] provides interesting references to the accounting for wealth accumulated by the rulers of Biblical times. In one case, Millard cites a gift from Tuthmosis III to the temple of Amun at Karnak. The walls of the temple catalogue the detailed inventory of items, large and small, and stands as an accounting record of the event

Predictive Fault Tolerance for Autonomous Robot Swarms

Active fault tolerance is essential for robot swarms to retain long-term autonomy. Previous work on swarm fault tolerance focuses on reacting to electro-mechanical faults that are spontaneously injected into robot sensors and actuators. Resolving faults once they have manifested as failures is an inefficient approach, and there are some safety-critical scenarios in which any kind of robot failure is unacceptable. We propose a predictive approach to fault tolerance, based on the principle of preemptive maintenance, in which potential faults are autonomously detected and resolved before they manifest as failures. Our approach is shown to improve swarm performance and prevent robot failure in the cases tested.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Run-time detection of faults in autonomous mobile robots based on the comparison of simulated and real robot behaviour

© 2014 IEEE. This paper presents a novel approach to the run-time detection of faults in autonomous mobile robots, based on simulated predictions of real robot behaviour. We show that although simulation can be used to predict real robot behaviour, drift between simulation and reality occurs over time due to the reality gap. This necessitates periodic reinitialisation of the simulation to reduce false positives. Using a simple obstacle avoidance controller afflicted with partial motor failure, we show that selecting the length of this reinitialisation time period is non-trivial, and that there exists a trade-off between minimising drift and the ability to detect the presence of faults

Conversational human-swarm interaction using IBM Cloud

Swarm robotics is an approach to the coordination of large numbers of robots that has become an increasingly popular field of research in recent years, not least because properly engineered robot swarms are scalable, flexible, and robust, making them an attractive alternative to single-robot systems in many application domains. Since its inception, the field of swarm robotics has grown beyond its roots in purely decentralised control inspired by social insect behaviour, now often utilising hybrid centralised/decentralised control architectures that incorporate human operators who guide swarm actions during tasks such as firefighting, or the localisation of radiation sources. This kind of human-swarm interaction has attracted significant interest from the research community, spawning an entire sub-field of its own that investigates how human operators, supervisors, and team-mates can interact with robot swarms and receive feedback from them. To date, human-swarm control methods such as the use of graphical user interfaces and spatial gestures have received much attention, but there has been little investigation into the potential of controlling swarm robotic systems with an operator’s voice. The few studies that have explored this idea are restricted to the use of specific predefined phrases that the human operator is required to learn, resulting in interactions that are unnatural in comparison to the way a human would normally express themselves in speech. In this paper, we present a novel architecture for conversational human-swarm interaction that addresses these issues, allowing swarm robotic systems to be engineered in such a way that a human operator can guide a swarm using spoken dialogue in a more natural manner

Exogenous Fault Detection in Swarm Robotic Systems

Swarm robotic systems comprise many individual robots, and exhibit a degree of innate fault tolerance due to this built-in redundancy. They are robust in the sense that the complete failure of individual robots will have little detrimental effect on a swarm's overall collective behaviour. However, it has recently been shown that partially failed individuals may be harmful, and cause problems that cannot be solved by simply adding more robots to the swarm. Instead, an active approach to dealing with failed individuals is required for a swarm to continue operation in the face of partial failures. This thesis presents a novel method of exogenous fault detection that allows robots to detect the presence of faults in each other, via the comparison of expected and observed behaviour. Each robot predicts the expected behaviour of its neighbours by simulating them online in an internal replica of the real world. This expected behaviour is then compared against observations of their true behaviour, and any significant discrepancy is detected as a fault. This work represents the first step towards a distributed fault detection, diagnosis, and recovery process that would afford robot swarms a high degree of fault tolerance, and facilitate long-term autonomy

Human-swarm interaction via e-ink displays

This paper proposes the use of e-ink displays to enhance human-swarm interaction research, and presents example hardware for the e-puck robot. We outline potential applications, including the display of a robot's internal status, as well as the use of e-ink displays to create dynamic fiducial markers

The Atrahasis Epic and its place in Babylonian literature.

The purpose of this study is to present, for the first time, the Epic of Atrahasis, as far as extant, in transliteration and translation (chapters II, III), and to examine it beside other Babylonian compositions containing similar material. Until 1965 only some three hundred lines of the Epic were known. That year saw the publication of the cuneiform text of some late Assyrian fragments by W.G. Lambert, and of two large Old Babylonian tablets by the writer (Cuneiform Texts XLVI). This new material, together with some unpublished texts, brings the number of lines represented to nearly one thousand (chapter 1) The large number of manuscripts of the work attest its popularity and importance. When the narrative of the creation of man is compared with other Mesopotamian texts, clear affinities are apparent with certain Sumerian and Akkadian traditions. Moreover, it can be shown that it probably formed a major source for the compilation of the later 'Babylonian Genesis', Enuma elish (chapter V). The second major theme, the Flood, is compared with other Flood Stories; parts of that narrative contained in the Gilgamesh Epic are identical with passages in the Atrahasis Epic, from which it is shown they were very probably borrowed (chapter VI). Certain sections within the poem reveal political institutions or practices of interest for the study of 'Primitive Democracy', of Babylonian concepts of remote history, and of traditions preserved in the King Lists (chapter VII). As a major literary work, the Epic of Atrahasis is shown to provide new material for investigation of the syntax and prosody of the 'Golden Age' of Akkadian literature (chapter IV). Obvious and important similarities to Hebrew tradition, closer in many points in Atrahasis than in any other Babylonian compositions, and the more remote comparisons with Greek legends fall beyond the scope of this investigation, but some indication of these is given (chapter VIII)