Logic And Sensor Control For Higher Level Robot Programming Languages

Previous works on industrial robots dealt with "programming" and "programming languages" only in passing; no comparison was made between characteristics of the individual programming lan guages. This book, therefore, gives a detailed account of industrial robot programming and its environment. Mter introducing basic concepts special attention is paid to the language constructs relevant to robot programming. The features of various elements of the languages ex amined are compared. The languages are based on the following concepts: SRL - high-level programming language based on AL with PASCAL elements (University of Karlsruhe, F. R G. ) PASRO - integrated into PASCAL, based on the geometrical data types of SRL (I. I. -BIOMATIC Informatics Institute, Freiburg, F. RG. ) AL - derived from the high-level programming language ALGOL (Stanford University, U. S. A. , and University of Karls ruhe, F. RG. ) AML - high-level programming language, influenced by PL/1 (IBM, U. S. A. ) VAL - language specifically developed for robots (Unimation, U. S. A. ) HELP - mixture of high-level language elements and robot l- guage elements and real-time processing (DEA, Italy) SIGLA - a simple machine language (Olivetti, Italy) ROBEX - based on NC programming (Technical College (RWTH), Aachen, F. RG. ) RAIL - high-level programming language for industrial robots with elements for graphic processing (Automatix, U. S. A. ) IRDATA - general software interface between programming and robot controller (Association of German Engineers (VDI), F. R G.

The creation of intelligent robots is surely one of the most exciting and ch- lenginggoals of Arti?cial Intelligence. A robot is, ?rst of all, nothing but an inanimate machine with motors and sensors. In order to bring life to it, the machine needs to be programmed so as to make active use of its hardware c- ponents. This turns a machine into an autonomous robot. Since about the mid nineties of the past century, robot programming has made impressive progress. State-of-the-art robots are able to orient themselves and move around freely in indoor environments or negotiate di?cult outdoor terrains, they can use stereo vision to recognize objects, and they are capable of simple object manipulation with the help of arti?cial extremities. At a time where robots perform these tasks more and more reliably,weare ready to pursue the next big step, which is to turn autonomous machines into reasoning robots.Areasoning robot exhibits higher cognitive capabilities like following complex and long-term strategies, making rational decisions on a high level, drawing logical conclusions from sensor information acquired over time, devising suitable plans, and reacting sensibly in unexpected situations. All of these capabilities are characteristics of human-like intelligence and ultimately distinguish truly intelligent robots from mere autonomous machines.

* Details the PICmicro microcontroller * Covers designing the robot system, software development, and advanced programming * Explains microcontroller connections

In contrast to the effortless ease with which human beings control their limbs, the design of controllers for robotic manipulator arms is a detailed, meticulous business. Motors controlling the arms need to be started and stopped at just the right moment so that the performance demanded by the user may be achieved at the end of a complicated manoeuvre. And yet, the same user wishes to express the task for the robot in the simplest possible terms without reference to the minute details of control sequences that his task demands. It is the design of such inter faces between man and machine that is the subject of trus volume. Parent and Laurgeau develop the subject in a direct and logical order. They first explain the principles of maximal effort control which not only ensure that motors are driven to provide high accuracy, but also that this should be done with the least waste of energy and in the shortest possible time. In this context, they describe the operation of pneumatic logical devices that make rapid decisions at power levels that exceed, by several orders, those that can be achieved with electronic devices. They achieve this whilst keeping the reader aware of the logical principles that are involved in the design of master control units: the devices responsible for appropriate actions being taken as a function of time.

No detailed description available for "Logic/Object-Oriented Concurrent Robot Programming and Performance Aspects".

* Teaches the concepts of behavior-based programming through text, programming examples, and a unique online simulator robot * Explains how to design new behaviors by manipulating old ones and adjusting programming * Does not assume reader familiarity with robotics or programming languages * Includes a section on designing your own behavior-based system from scratch

A collective autonomic system consists of collaborating autonomic entities which are able to adapt at runtime, adjusting to the state of the environment and incorporating new knowledge into their behavior. These highly dynamic systems are also known as ensembles. To ensure correct behavior of ensembles it is necessary to support their development through appropriate methods and tools which can guarantee that an autonomic system lives up to its intended purpose; this includes respecting important constraints of the environment. This State-of-the-Art Survey addresses the engineering of such systems by presenting the methods, tools and theories developed within the ASCENS project. ASCENS was an integrated project funded in the period 2010-2015 by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission as part of the Future Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative (FET Proactive). The 17 contributions included in this book are organized in four parts corresponding to the research areas of the project and their concrete applications: (I) language and verification for self-awareness and self-expression, (II) modeling and theory of self-aware and adaptive systems, (III) engineering techniques for collective autonomic systems, and last but not least, (IV) challenges and feedback provided by the case studies of the project in the areas of swarm robotics, cloud computing and e-mobility.

This thesis advocates the usefulness and practicality of a logic-based approach to AI and in particular to high-level control of mobile robots. The contribution of the research work reported here is twofold: (1) the development of theoretical frameworks that account for uncertainty and unmodeled dynamics in an environment where an acting agent has to achieve certain goals and (2) the implementation of the developed ideas on a mobile robot. According to one perspective, investigated in Chapter 4, the agent has a logical model of the world, but there is no probabilistic information about the environment where the agent is planning to act, and the agent is not capable or has no time for acquiring probabilities of different effects of its actions. In this case, the uncertainty and dynamics of the environment can be accounted only by observing the real outcomes of actions executed by the agent, by determining possible discrepancies between the observed outcomes and the effects expected according to the logical model of the world and then by recovering, if necessary, from the relevant discrepancies. To recover the agent computes on-line an appropriate correction of the program that is being executed. A general framework for execution monitoring of Golog programs provides the aforementioned functionalities and generalizes those previously known approaches to execution monitoring that have been formulated only for cases when the agent is given a linearly or partially ordered sequence of actions, but not an arbitrary program. According to the second perspective, investigated in Chapter 5, we can model actions of the agent as stochastic actions and characterize them by a finite set of probabilities: whenever the agent does a stochastic action, it may lead to a finite number of possible outcomes. Two major innovations in this research direction are the development of a decision-theoretic Golog (DT Golog) interpreter, that deals with programs that include stochastic actions, and the development of the situation calculus representation of MDPs. In addition to this off-line DT-Golog interpreter, in Chapter 6 we develop an on-line DT Golog interpreter that combines planning with the execution of policies. This new on-line architecture allows one to compute an optimal policy (optimal with respect to a given Golog program and a current model of the world) from an initial segment of a Golog program, execute the computed policy on-line and then proceed to computing and executing policies for the remaining segments of the program. The specification and implementation of the on-line interpreter requires a new approach to the representation of sensing actions in the situation calculus. A formal study of this approach is undertaken in Chapter 3. We also describe implementations of our frameworks; these were successfully tested in a real office environment on a mobile robot B21. We have elaborated the approach to designing efficient and reliable controllers in Golog following two different perspectives on the environment where the control program is supposed to operate.

Intelligent agents are one of the most important developments in computer science of the past decade. Agents are of interest in many important application areas, ranging from human-computer interaction to industrial process control. The ATAL workshop series aims to bring together researchers interested in the core/micro aspects of agent technology. Speci?cally, ATAL addresses issues such as theories of agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for r- lizing agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent systems. One of the strengthsoftheATALworkshopseriesisitsemphasisonthesynergiesbetweentheories, languages, architectures, infrastructures, methodologies, and formal methods. This year s workshop continued the ATAL trend of attracting a large number of high quality submissions. In more detail, 71 papers were submitted to the ATAL 2000 workshop, from 21 countries. After stringent reviewing, 22 papers were accepted for publication and appear in these proceedings. As with previous workshops in the series, we chose to emphasize what we perceive asimportantnewthemesinagentresearch. Thisyear sthemeswerebothassociatedwith the fact that the technology of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems is beginning to migrate from research labs to software engineering centers. As agents are deployed in applications such as electronic commerce, and start to take over responsibilities for their human users, techniques for controlling their autonomy become crucial. As well, the availability of tools that facilitate the design and implementation of agent systems becomes an important factor in how rapidly the technology will achieve widespread use.