Spartacus attending the 2005 AAAI conference

Abstract

Spartacus is our robot entry in the 2005 AAAI Mobile Robot Challenge, making a robot attend the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Designing robots that are capable of interacting with humans in real-life settings can be considered the ultimate challenge when it comes to intelligent autonomous systems. One key issue is the integration of multiple modalities (e.g., mobility, physical structure, navigation, vision, audition, dialogue, reasoning). Such integration increases the diversity and also the complexity of interactions the robot can generate. It also makes it difficult to monitor how such increased capabilities are used in unconstrained conditions, whether it is done while the robot is in operation of afterwards. This paper reports solutions and findings resulting from our hardware, software and decisional integration work on Spartacus. It also outlines perspectives in making intelligent and interaction capabilities evolve for autonomous robots.

Engineering intelligent information-processing systems with CAST

“…In typical intelligent robotics applications it is possible to separate at least two levels of architecture: an information-processing architecture (alternatively referred to as a functional or computational architecture, or a cognitive model) and a software architecture. For example, Spartacus (a robot that attended the AAAI 2005 conference) [27] can be said to have architecture designs at three levels:…”

“…• The final level presented in [27] is Spartacus's software architecture. This level shows how the instantiated information-processing architecture is actually implemented in the component-based software framework MARIE [10].…”

Iterative Design of Advanced Mobile Robots

“…It is based on the notion of having motivated selection of behavior-producing modules. We refer to it as MBA, for Motivated Behavioral Architecture [21,20]. It is composed of three principal components:…”

“…It requires coherent and user-friendly representation of the integrated components so that developers can concentrate on their combined usage instead of spending time extracting and interpreting data in log files. In 2005, we developed a log viewing application, allowing us to monitor off-line the complete set of states of the robot through log files created by the different software components [21]. In 2006, we extended this tool to provide a dynamic and real-time view of what the robot is actually doing and planning to do, on-line.…”

“…Our team was the first and only one to attempt the event from start to end, using sonars as proximity sensors, navigating in the environment by reading written letters and symbols, using a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera, interacting with people through a touch-screen interface, displaying a graphical face to express the robot's emotional state, determining what to do next, using a finitestate machine (FSM), recharging itself when needed, and generating a HTML report of its experience [19]. We then started to work on a more advanced platform that we first presented in the 2005 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition [21,20]. Our focus was on integrating perceptual and decisional components addressing all four issues outlined during the AAAI events over the years, i.e.…”