DAMN: A Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation

Dr. Julio Rosenblatt
Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney

Tuesday 23 July at 11am

Abstract

An architecture for intelligent agents is presented in which distributed decision-making processes, or behaviours, jointly determine an agent's actions by sending votes to a centralised arbiter. One type of arbiter defined within this architecture performs a form of command fusion similar to fuzzy logic, thus allowing multiple goals and constraints to be considered simultaneously. Another type of arbiter performs action selection via a new means of action selection known as utility fusion, in which behaviours indicate the utility of various possible world states, along with their associated uncertainty; the arbiter then combines these utilities and probabilities to determine a Pareto-optimal action based on the maximisation of expected utility. Experimental results are provided for an autonomous land-based robot, as well as an underwater one, and the efficacy of the two approaches to decision-making are compared.

Short resume

Dr. Julio Rosenblatt is a Senior Research Associate at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at Sydney University, and is an Australian Research Fellow. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996 and 1991, respectively, and the S.B. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. He was formerly Director of the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a research scientist at the Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, CA. He is currently investigating co-operative robotics, as well as the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods for mobile robot navigation.

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