From insect to Internet: Situated control for networked robot teams

Ant-like systems take advantage of agents' situatedness to reduce or eliminate the need for centralized control or global knowledge. This reduces the need for complexity of individuals and leads to robust, scalable systems. Such insect-inspired situated approaches have proven effective both for task performance and task allocation. The desire for general, principled techniques for situated interaction has led us to study the exploitation of abstract situatedness – situatedness in non-physical environments. The port-arbitrated behavior-based control approach provides a well-structured abstract behavior space in which agents can participate in situated interaction. We focus on the problem of role assumption, distributed task allocation in which each agent selects its own task-performing role. This paper details our general, principled Broadcast of Local Eligibility (BLE) technique for role-assumption in such behavior-space-situated systems, and provides experimental results from the CMOMMT target-tracking task. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Structured Reactive Controllers

Service robots, such as autonomous office couriers or robot tourguides, must be both reliable and efficient. This requires them to flexibly interleave their tasks, exploit opportunities, quickly plan their course of action, and, if necessary, revise their intended activities. In this paper, we show how structured reactive controllers (SRCs) satisfy these requirements. The novel feature of SRCs is that they employ and reason about plans that specify and synchronize concurrent percept-driven behavior. Powerful control abstractions enable SRCs to integrate physical action, perception, planning, and communication in a uniform framework and to apply fast but imperfect computational methods without sacrificing reliability and flexibility. Concurrent plans are represented in a transparent and modular form so that automatic planning processes can reason about the plans and revise them. We present experiments in which SRCs are used to control two autonomous mobile robots. In one of them an SRC controlled the course of action of a museum tourguide robot that has operated for thirteen days, more than ninetyfour hours, completed 620 tours, and presented 2668 exhibits.     

Time-bound negotiation framework for electronic commerce agents

For efficient and informative coordination of agents especially in electronic commerce environment, a time-bound agent negotiation framework is proposed utilizing a time-based commitment scheme. By attaching commitment duration to agent messages, the traditional contract net protocol is extended to a time-bound negotiation framework (TBNF). The proposed negotiation framework has a new message type which allows for parties to agree upon the extension of a commitment duration, and a novel commitment concept in the form of negative commitment. The semantics of the messages with the commitment duration are interpreted, and then the three typical negotiation protocols are formally defined and compared — nothing-guaranteed protocol, acceptance-guaranteed protocol, and finite-time guarantee protocol — which can be incorporated into TBNF. The TBNF should provide a background for efficient and effective electronic commerce negotiation while accommodating each agent's adaptive negotiation strategy.     

Supporting Different Dimensions of Adaptability in Workflow Modeling

This paper discusses the theme of workflow systemadaptability in relation to process modeling. Startingfrom a discussion on the role of formal constructs incooperation, the main claim is that adaptabilityinvolves different dimensions of process modeling.These dimensions concern the possibility to flexiblycombine a rich set of basic categories in order toobtain the most suitable language for modeling thetarget business process and the work practices aroundit; to take into account various levels of visibilityof the contexts of definition and use of a processmodel; and finally to allow for temporary as well aspermanent modifications of the process itself.Ariadne, a notation conceived for the above purpose,is illustrated by means of a working example.Moreover, the paper presents the main designprinciples governing Ariadne's implementation.     

机器人动态抓取的变比例导引路径规划方法

研究机器人手眼协调系统接近和抓取运动目标的路径规划方法,提出了一种脱胎于比例导引方法的变比例导引（ＶＧＰ）路径规划方法,这 方法设定手扑的视角在接近目标过程中以镁速不断变化,因而可以使手扑从目标运动前方拦截到目标,另外,机器人手扑在接近目标时,可以同时调整手主的接近姿态,以包抄的方式以目标。这种路径规划方法能够容许更大的目标位置估计误差,并能处理目标的机动运动,因而优于传统的目标跟踪路径规划方法,     

Cooperation coordination in virtual enterprises

Coordination of activities is a determinant element in virtual enterprises. Proper coordination policies supported by flexible coordination mechanisms are necessary to ensure the cooperation among partner enterprises. This paper presents the PRODNET approach to support coordination in virtual enterprises. The adopted model considers on flexibility and configurability as the key aspects to cope with the large diversity of expectable scenarios and operating policies in the virtual enterprise environment. A workflow based approach for coordination is described and especial emphasis is put on a multi-level coordination view. The developed software modules that support the coordination mechanisms are presented, and finally some directions for further research are given.     

Simulating Emergent Properties of Coordination in Maude: the Collective Sort Case

Recent coordination languages and models are moving towards the application of techniques coming from the research context of complex systems: adaptivity and self-organization are exploited in order to tackle the openness, dynamism and unpredictability of today's distributed systems. In this area, systems are to be described using stochastic models, and simulation is a valuable tool both for analysis and design. Accordingly, in this work we focused on modelling and simulating emergent properties of coordination techniques.We first develop a framework acting as a general-purpose engine for simulating stochastic transition systems, built as a library for the Maude term rewriting system. We then evaluate this tool to a coordination problem called collective sort, where autonomous agents move tuples across different tuple spaces according to local criteria, and resulting in the emergence of the complete clustering property.     

基于在线识别的机器人动态手眼协调

本文研究了基于在线识别的机器人动态手眼协调,通过视觉在线识别目标的结果来 动态规划机器人的运动,改善了系统的柔性,提高了系统对环境的适应能力．实验证明,文 中所采用的识别算法具有很好的实时性和可靠性．引入语音控制改善了人机交互．     

Multirobot coordination in pick-and-place tasks on a moving conveyor

This paper considers the problem of multirobot coordination in pick-and-place tasks on a conveyor band. The robot team is composed of identical robots with mutually exclusive, but neighboring workspaces. The products are fed in at one end of the band, move through each workspace sequentially until being picked up and are collected at the other end—if not picked up interim. Each robot has the same task—that is picking up and packaging as many products as possible. We propose an approach based on noncooperative game theory where each robot uses local observations of the conveyor band and their neighbors' actions in order to decide on its actions. The developed algorithm has been implemented and tested in a simulated manufacturing environment using Webots. Results obtained from the simulations are analyzed using a variety of statistical performance measures.     

Self-emergence of a common lexicon by evolution in teams of autonomous agents

In multi-agent systems, the study of language and communication is an active field of research. In this paper we present the application of evolutionary strategies to the self-emergence of a common lexicon in a population of agents. By modeling the vocabulary or lexicon of each agent as an association matrix or look-up table that maps the meanings (i.e. the objects encountered by the agents or the states of the environment itself) into symbols or signals we check whether it is possible for the population to converge in an autonomous, decentralized way to a common lexicon, so that the communication efficiency of the entire population is optimal. We have conducted several experiments aimed at testing whether it is possible to converge with evolutionary strategies to an optimal Saussurean communication system. We have organized our experiments alongside two main lines: first, we have investigated the effect of the population size on the convergence results. Second, and foremost, we have also investigated the effect of the lexicon size on the convergence results. To analyze the convergence of the population of agents we have defined the population's consensus when all the agents (i.e. 100% of the population) share the same association matrix or lexicon. As a general conclusion we have shown that evolutionary strategies are powerful enough optimizers to guarantee the convergence to lexicon consensus in a population of autonomous agents.