Universität Bielefeld - Sonderforschungsbereich 360
The Dynamics of Intelligence:
Constraint-Based Architecture for Situated Agents
Alan K. Mackworth
Laboratory for Computational Intelligence
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia, Canada
Abstract
A robot is, typically, a hybrid intelligent system, consisting
of a controller coupled to its plant.
The Constraint Net (CN) model is a formal and practical model for
building hybrid intelligent systems as Situated Agents. In CN, we
model a robotic system as a symmetrical coupling of a robot with its
environment. Even though a robotic system is, generally, a hybrid dynamical
system, its CN model is unitary. Most other robot design methodologies
use hybrid models of hybrid systems, awkwardly combining
offline computational models of high-level perception, reasoning and
planning with online models of low-level sensing and control.
Many robots can be designed as online constraint-satisfying devices.
A robot in this restricted scheme can be verified more easily.
Moreover, given a constraint-based specification and a model of the
plant and the environment, automatic synthesis of a correct
perceiver-controller becomes feasible.
In our lab we have developed a testbed for multiple,
visually-controlled, cheap robot vehicles performing a variety of
tasks, including playing soccer.
The ideas developed in this talk are illustrated by application to
the challenge of building robot soccer players.
This work is joint with Ying Zhang and several others.
Anke Weinberger, 1997-11-24