This prototype represents a note that will be exported to the Web site.

I was surprised to see that an article I coauthored was finally published in the latest issue of Robotics and Automation Magazine. It had been so long ago that it took me a while to place the paper -- I guess it takes quite a while for a special issue to get published.

Anyway, the paper can be found here.

I was surprised to see that an article I coauthored was finally published in the latest issue of Robotics and Automation Magazine. It had been so long ago that it took me a while to place the paper -- I guess it takes quite a while for a special issue to get published.

Anyway, the paper can be found here.

Turns out "situatedagent.com" hasn't been taken. Unfortunately "robothor" can be parsed in several more ways than I had originally intended... This is probably for the best.

I've been trying to redo some presentations about the architecture of the Distributed Field Robot Architecture. It seem that we have some interest from several groups regarding actually using it for large robotics projects. So I have been trying to clean the codebase up a little bit (amazing the cruft that develops...) and build some new presentations to explain some of the design elements behind what I have been doing.

I just posted some pictures of the shorty. I built the sub-site with Sandvox, just to play around with the demo.

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Wow, Hannah got me the latest issue of Make for Christmas. I've been reading the online blog for a while, but am really impressed with the quality of the print magazine.

Now I am in a deep quandary: too many cool projects, with far, far too little time to play.

Maybe next year...

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A while back I submitted a short research outline to the AAAI Fall Symposium. It went over well enough that I have been expanding what I wrote there to continue towards my dissertation. Unfortunately, it did not scale directly; or rather, I need to restructure quite a bit to get it to scale up. So I have fallen to try to mind-map how all the bits and pieces inter-relate. I think that it has worked out rather well.

The mind-map doesn't really translate directly to an outline though. So I fell back on Tinderbox agents to help with this task. First I added a couple of simple attributes: Section and Order. Then we can use an agent to collect all the notes for a section, sorting on the Order attribute:

Since the agent is looking for notes with the section attribute that includes a given tag, we can place a note in multiple sections. The upshot is that I can now shuffle sections around just by changing two attributes and the agents automatically restructure the outline.

The downside is that I can only do this for a single level -- children of agents, but not grandchildren.

We just finished a site visit from the Department of Homeland Security. We teamed with seven other universities and submitted a proposal to be the fifth DHS Center of Excellence. We'd be focusing on preparedness for and response to high consequence events. We've seen quite a bit of this recently, with mudslides, hurricanes and other natural disasters, as well as the human-generated events of recent history. We've had a lot of experience from the response side and we are teaming with some really brilliant researchers at the other universities, so I think we are well positioned for this proposal. I hope the site visitors thought the same.

I was not presenting or anything -- we hosted the event, so I and the other grad students have been preparing for this since we found out about the visit, and have been scrambling this week to make sure the event went as smoothly as possible. For us this meant making sure the A/V equipment was set up correctly, copying slides, assembling binders, doing last-minute fact-checking, and so on.

It was also very nice to finally put some faces to some names of people I was aware of via publications and reputation. Jeff Bradshaw from IHMC was also in -- we've worked together a bit over the past year or so -- but we barely had time to say hello and chat for a few minutes. The work that I am doing for my PhD ties in with work his interests and I wanted to have a chance to talk over some of it with him. Guess email will have to do...

So after the first half of the week being 12-16 hour days, it was nice to relax and recover a bit today. Unfortunately I got to deal with administrative hassles today -- like trying to figure out why I couldn't access my health insurance account to print this year's id card and why I won't get paid for August until September. Grrr....

I've seen a few people try this, but with limited results -- mainly because they were just piling books and boxes under their monitor until they could stand up. But I would imagine and actual workstation might work pretty well. I do notice that I need to get up an move around quite a bit to keep comfortable during the day. For me this usually means a hike across campus to get coffee and work the kinks and soreness out. Maybe when (if!) we move into the new building I can talk the powers-that-be into a standing setup.

Anyone had experiences trying this?

This prototype represents a note that will be exported to the Web site.

Regular readers of this site may note (all none of you), that there have been a few Tinderbox notes posted recently, and not a lot about research or robotics. I have been in the process of trying to get a proposal (PhD dissertation) put together, and that is taking up a great deal of time. Besides that I don't really want to steal my own thunder too much.

It turns out that what I am looking at is meshing in rather nicely with quite a few topics that are "hot" on the internets. Some topics of interest:

• Semantic Web technologies (particularly OWL)
• Semantic blogging (which should be of interest to Tinderbox users)
• Ontologies and semantic integration
• Robot-assisted search and rescue

How does it all fit together, you may ask? I gotta keep some secrets...

So I ran across what I think is a bug in Tinderbox. I have a note that has a bunch of pictures and links. I set the links by selecting the appropriate text (usually inside [ ... ] ), then setting it to the web location I want. Normally no problem. In this particular note, the location seem to be getting messed up somehow. For example, the box around the linked text 13MB WMV in the note is correct. In the link browser, it is 3MB WMV] (not correct).

It gets worse, though. The intended link for 200KB WMV (toward the bottom) somehow now includes the image (and caused XHTML validation errors when I export).

This is very similar to the last Tinderbox + Automator experiment. Instead of purely Automator, though, I thought I'd try to work with some of the Finder tools.

First stab: Let's see if we do a Folder Action on the export directory. Can it run an Automator workflow? It turns out I can. I like running the Automator scripts -- they give good feedback in the status bar as to which portion of the script is executing.

So if all works well, we have a folder that will automatically upload its contents when I export HTML from Tinderbox.

I just made my life a little easier with Automator today.

My usual use of Tinderbox for the website involves the following:

1) Work in Tinderbox.

2) Export to HTML for upload.

3) Open Terminal if it is not open

4) rsync from my local machine to the website.

Not terribly hard, but a bit tedious. Automator just made this a little easier. I made a workflow that takes a directory and rsyncs it to the right spot. Check out the sample. You'll probably want to stick it in your ~/Library/Scripts directory

Pretty simple workflow -- it asks for the export directory first. In my case I select ~/Sites/robothor/export and hit OK. Then it POSIX encodes the path and quotes the result in case there is a space in the path somewhere. The third step is executing a small shell script to upload to the server. If you want to modify the script, you'll need to change this. I am running sshKeychain, which handles giving the correct password to rsync. The final step is just a simple Growl notification letting me know it is done. This is very simplistic, but it seems to work for me so far.

At some point it would be nice to see either Automator actions or Applescript support to Tinderbox. Imagine running a workflow that tells Tinderbox to export as HTML, then automatically uploading this to the server. Unfortunately TB won't accept Automator workflows as scripts, so I can't call the script from within TB. Oh well...

So I'm in a little bit of a quandary at the moment. My current laptop, a gigabit ethernet G4 Powerbook, is starting to have problems. The top case started to crack around one of the hinges and I believe damaged one of the cables for the display. Now it still works -- I did a jerry-rigged fix to repair the break, but after I close and open the lid I have to finesse the display to get it to work.

I know what I want to do:

1) Give this laptop to Hannah. We can set it up in a fixed location at home and it should be OK. We wanted to do some music work with Hannah singing, and Garage Band is ideal for starting out.

2) I'd get a new laptop. I'm leaning toward a Powerbook 12". Two doubts about this laptop at the moment. One is the eternal fear that an updated version will be released mere moments after it is too late to change an order. Not much I can do about this... The second is the size: will the 12" screen be too small for me? Workaround for this is a KVM and use the nice big screen at work when I am here.

The biggest problem right now is budget. In theory I have some loans for the next year that will be kicking in soon and I do need a laptop. I often find that changing my location is good for my thoughts and focus and I can't take advantage of a portable with a broken screen. I can also go the "Student Developer Discount", which will give a nice 20% discount (see here for details). This makes it a little more palatable, but still not cheap.

Well, I know which of these inner voices will win, but hopefully I can hold out a little longer and wait until we're in a slightly better financial spot. I don't suppose anyone wants to throw an equipment grant my way... :-)

A case of "why didn't I do this sooner" when I saw this post on the Tinderbox wiki about auto-generating a Google Sitemap. I modified the provided templates a bit because I wanted to fill in some of the optional attributes. As suggested, I use an agent to collect exported notes with the following templates:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"

xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:schemaLocation= "http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84

http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

^children(sitemap-item.xml)^

</urlset>

and

<url>

<loc>^urlEncode(^URL^)^</loc>

<lastmod>^Get(Modified, =)^</lastmod>

<priority>^Get(GoogleSitemapPriority)^</priority>

<changefreq>^Get(GoogleSitemapChangeFreq)^</changefreq>

</url>

The change I made to this is to suck out the priority and change frequency from attributes. One nifty aspect of Tinderbox is that I can apply some defaults (say GoogleSitemapPriority of .5) and then override this so certain pages have a higher priority. Works like a charm and now I don't have to worry about mucking around with one of those perl sitemap builders...

Kudos to the Tinderbox community for continually finding neat things to do with this program.

So the school library has started purchasing resources through an online library. While the USF library is otherwise excellent, I take issue with this decision for a number of reasons. Let me first state though, that I really don't have a problem with the concept of an "ebook", mostly just with this particular instantiation. Problems that should be fixed:

• Each page of the book is a separate document. In the browser window, the embedded Adobe Reader will show one page at a time. The main problem with this is flipping pages -- with network lag and often-slow loads, by the time the next page has loaded, I've lost the thread of the sentence. If I want to go back page to re-read a passage, wait... wait... wait... what was I going to read again?
• No apparent way to bookmark a passage -- or even a page. While not as draconian as it could be, even going so far as to allow the printing of a single page at a time, there is no online way to bookmark a page or otherwise save a location. This is especially troublesome because of the
• Short timeout. Don't get distracted and let the system timeout -- you'll need to search for the book again, reopen it, and go to the page you were on. What's that? Didn't note the page number before the book auto-closed? Hope you're patient while you search.
• Oh, and I can't get it to work right in Safari...

I just heard from Lefteris that he just got back from presenting his paper (well, our paper technically, but he did all the writing) at the 2005 Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation. I've updated the link to reflect the final version in the proceedings.

I think I need to start submitting to these fun overseas conferences. The AAAI Fall Symposium in Alexandria, VA will be fun and it will be good to see my Grandma, but there is something about going to Cyprus for a work conference...

I spent a little time today trying to get Spotlight to import Tinderbox files correctly. I was initially having problems and knew the latest Tinderbox (2.5) was supposed to be Spotlightable. So what do we know about Tinderbox files?

$ mdls Tinderbox\ release\ notes

Tinderbox release notes -------------

kMDItemAttributeChangeDate = 2005-06-30 11:20:26 -0400

kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2002-03-08 14:21:13 -0500

kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2005-06-27 13:49:50 -0400

kMDItemContentType = "dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8yg3pwqy"

kMDItemContentTypeTree = ("public.data", "public.item")

kMDItemDisplayName = "Tinderbox release notes"

kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 2005-06-27 13:49:50 -0400

kMDItemFSCreationDate = 2002-03-08 14:21:13 -0500

kMDItemFSCreatorCode = 1130721893

kMDItemFSFinderFlags = 16

kMDItemFSInvisible = 0

kMDItemFSLabel = 0

kMDItemFSName = "Tinderbox release notes"

kMDItemFSNodeCount = 0

kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = 80

kMDItemFSOwnerUserID = 501

kMDItemFSSize = 646376

kMDItemFSTypeCode = 1130721893

kMDItemID = 2251793

kMDItemKind = "Tinderbox document"

kMDItemLastUsedDate = 2005-06-30 11:19:26 -0400

kMDItemUsedDates = (2005-06-30 11:19:26 -0400, 2005-06-29 20:00:00 -0400)

The important bits for our purpose are the kMDItemContentType and kMDItemContentTypeTree. These are set by the Spotlight importer and are what Spotlight "knows" about the filetype. Here the Tinderbox Release Notes is treated as just plain data and not indexed.

$ mdimport -d1 Tinderbox\ release\ notes

2005-07-01 16:46:21.470 mdimport[13845] Import '/Applications/Productivity/Tinderbox 2.5/Tinderbox release notes' type 'dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8yg3pwqy' no mdimporter

Now, I have a choice -- I can either let Spotlight not index the file, or I can finesse the RichText.mdimporter to handle this type. We'll ignore this for now.

So let's look at another Tinderbox. The original box for this web site was called RoboTHOR. I'd never added a file extension, since I hadn't needed it previously, but obviously raw Tinderboxes don't work ideally. What if I renamed it to RoboTHOR.xml ?

$ mdls RoboTHOR.xml

RoboTHOR.xml -------------

kMDItemAttributeChangeDate = 2005-07-01 16:28:00 -0400

kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2005-04-19 18:48:33 -0400

kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2005-07-01 14:39:31 -0400

kMDItemContentType = "public.xml"

kMDItemContentTypeTree = ("public.xml", "public.text", "public.data", "public.item", "public.content")

kMDItemDisplayName = "RoboTHOR"

...

Certainly better. Now mdimport's output will be a little more pleasant:

$ mdimport -d1 RoboTHOR.xml

2005-07-01 16:48:24.961 mdimport[13852] Import '/Users/mtlong/Sites/robothor/RoboTHOR.xml' type 'public.xml' using 'file://localhost/System/Library/Spotlight/ RichText.mdimporter/'

So now the final test. What about .tbx, the normal extension for Tinderbox documents?

$ mdls RoboTHOR.tbx

RoboTHOR.tbx -------------

kMDItemAttributeChangeDate = 2005-07-01 16:50:00 -0400

kMDItemContentCreationDate = 2005-04-19 18:48:33 -0400

kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2005-07-01 16:33:18 -0400

kMDItemContentType = "com.testgate.tinderbox"

kMDItemContentTypeTree = (

"com.testgate.tinderbox",

"public.xml",

"public.text",

"public.data",

"public.item",

"public.content"

)

...

But now we have stopped getting love from mdimport:

$ mdimport -d1 RoboTHOR.tbx

2005-07-01 16:50:48.586 mdimport[13872] Import '/Users/mtlong/Sites/robothor/RoboTHOR.tbx' type 'com.testgate.tinderbox' no mdimporter

Spotlight will no longer import this file, even though it still knows that it is XML. But there is a solution. We can modify the /System/Library/Spotlight/ RichText.mdimporter/Contents/Info.plist and alter the LSItemContentTypes array as follows:

<key>LSItemContentTypes</key>

<array>

<string>public.rtf</string>

<string>public.html</string>

<string>public.xml</string>

<string>public.plain-text</string>

<string>com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text</string>

<string>com.apple.rtfd</string>

<string>com.apple.webarchive</string>

<string>com.testgate.tinderbox</string>

<string>dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8yg3pwqy</string>

</array>

We simply added com.testgate.tinderbox and dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8yg3pwqy. Now mdimport

$ mdimport -d2 RoboTHOR.tbx

2005-07-01 16:09:53.020 mdimport[13591] Import '/Users/mtlong/Sites/robothor/RoboTHOR.tbx' type 'com.testgate.tinderbox' using 'file://localhost/System/Library/Spotlight/ RichText.mdimporter/'

$ mdimport -d1 Tinderbox\ release\ notes

2005-07-01 17:35:27.905 mdimport[13901] Import '/Applications/Productivity/Tinderbox 2.5/Tinderbox release notes' type 'dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8yg3pwqy' using 'file://localhost/System/Library/Spotlight/ RichText.mdimporter/'

Now were sitting fat dumb and happy.

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As per request, I am linking to the videos that I used during the presentation. They are Windows Media, for the most part; I typically use Quicktime, but these had already been converted. YMMV

techknowledge:

[13MB WMV]

Medical Triage Sensor:

[52MB AVI]

Night Vision Sensor:

[200KB WMV, 53KB WMV, 40KB WMV]

More information, especially pictures and context, on the CRASAR Hurricane Charley page.

Other exciting clips include Aaron's work on Affective Recruitment. I did not have time to discuss it in the presentation, but it was a good exercise stressing the distributed architecture and is an interesting view:

[54MB WMV]

And finally, I touched on our use of VTOLs. We have a news clip that shows a little of our work in that area:

[4.3MB WMV]

A note on the videos: Windows Media Player will try to stream these files and most likely complain. If this happens, just download the file and it should play correctly.

I gave a presentation this morning to the Florida West Coast section. As you can see, I was primarily talking about the search and rescue group at USF, CRASAR. As per request, I am posting some copies of slides in [PDF] and [Flash]. I did this presentation in Keynote, which most people don't use, so hopefully these versions will work.

I thought the presentation went reasonably well -- no one actually fell asleep on me and I had a good question and answer session at the end. I have a few things I would like to change the next time I do this talk, which will likely be in a few months at the IEEE Sections Congress here in Tampa. I think a better approach for that venue will be a "Day in the Life of a Rescue Robot", and using this I can build a better framework for the presentation. Should be fun -- especially since the audience there will be more on the order of a thousand...

Oh, the videos that I used in the presentation were pretty massive. If anyone is interested in the media clips I used, please email me and I will see if I can dig up smaller / more compressed versions.

After Andrew's wedding, Hannah and I took a day or so of personal time before seeing all the family. We drove from Laramie to the Springs, taking the scenic route through the mountains. We stopped a few times for some fun. I wonder how long "Melty the Snowman" lasted?

Then we spent the night in Manitou Springs, and wandered around the town the following day. Manitou has the highest Bed and Breakfast per capita ratio of any town I've ever been in, but besides that is filled with little parks (most around the springs for which it gets its name).

Hannah hadn't seen much of this part of Colorado, so we did some touristy things like the Cliff Dwellings (we took the Cog Railway to the top of Pike's Peak the last time we were there together).

Andrew's wedding was first:

Very lovely ceremony. It was outdoors at an old, historic building in Laramie. We lucked out and ended up staying a mere block away from the wedding site. There was lots of singing (by friends of Andrew and Brennae), and during the reception, Hannah sang "Look to the Rainbow" a capella to the bride and groom. She said they were misting up:

And there was lots of dancing. Unfortunately for me, it was (almost) all folk dancing that they had been doing for years. So they would put a song on and everyone would form some complex shape and do some complicated footwork. I tried once or twice to follow along before I sat down. Hannah, being much more coordinated than I had no problem learning the steps.

Congratulations!

Man what a week... Hannah and I just got back from ten days in Colorado and Wyoming for Andrew and Brennae's wedding (Laramie), followed by my sister Karen's graduation from the US Air Force Academy and marriage (Colorado Springs).

I'll post some pictures, but all events were wonderful and I couldn't be happier for Andrew, Brennae, Karen (x2) and Frank.

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I'm attempting to write an extended abstract for Roles '05. Every so often I have to remind myself of a very useful tool that help me keep focused on the main points of the paper. These are from George Heilmeyer when he was the director of ARPA and are good to answer for any research project:

• What is the problem, why is it hard?

• How is it solved today?

• What is the new technical idea; why can we succeed now?

• What is the impact if successful?

• How will the program be organized?

• How will intermediate results be generated.

• How will you measure progress?

• What will it cost?

Now this is obviously something that I need to work on, although the chances of fixing my handwriting are pretty slim. Apparently I write with my fingers instead of my whole arm. Of course, if you follow any martial art, this doesn't go far enough. I'd imagine I should really figure out how to write from my hara. Actually this might not be a bad idea, especially for teaching in front of a class and writing on the board.

Jeff Kramer is a new graduate student in the lab. He spent a few months in Japan recently, and posted pictures and a travelogue.

I've added a links page that I will be updating periodically. It will primarily have links that I find useful. Currently administrative links for USF-related activities. I've also joined feedster and this post should hopefully register this site with them.

So it looks like Boblbee has some new bags that might one day satisfy my pack fetish. I currently am using the Megalopolis, which works well and leads one main question: 1) What the hell is that?

But I've been in the market for a laptop bag and Boblbee might be able to help out there:

or are possibilities. Any bag that lets you use tools to change the look is ok with me!

And of course there is the new Amphib, a soft-shell sport backpack:

Ultra-light snowboard climbing pack with extreme water resistence. Essentially waterproof, but not to be submersed. Molded protective lid, access to inside bag with snowboard mounted. Body moulded ultra- light shoulder straps. Super strong diecut Hypron waistbelt. Glued and laminated shells with Hypron canvas protection. Goggle and glove pocket. Waterproof welded lock. Ice ax/pole attachment. High density laminated moulded foam with rip protective nylon mesh. Shovel/rope/board guard in tauplin canvas.

Fun, huh?

If you are like me and like abstract art, then you should check out Andrew's work. He once described his general artistic vision as this:

Close your eyes. Now take your palms and press them against your eyelids until you start to see shapes and patterns. That's what I am trying to do.

Seems to be getting pretty close, last time I checked.

I'm not exactly sure why I'm writing about this at present, but I think it may have something to do with the artwork -- I'm currently reading "The Cyberiad", by Stanislaw Lem with artwork by Daniel Mróz and the books remind me of each other, although one is fiction (Lem) and the other is robotics and psychology.

I actually read Vehicles ages go in my first robotics class. It is a look at the possibilities of intelligence and evolution, showing how complex behaviors can be build up out of small pieces. The book is really laid out as a gedanken experiment -- one that is grounded in biology as the last half of the book points out. The books starts with a description of the vehicles, then proceeds to show how they might exhibit behaviors such as fear, love, and hate, learn to recognize shapes, think, plan and so on. This correlates with a paradigm in robotics called the behavioral (or reactive) paradigm, which states that complex behaviors can be built up out of the complex interaction of many simple behaviors. This is a vast simplification, so see the literature for more information.

That said, this is a great little book that is as much a meditation on though, development, psychology and evolution as it is on robotics.

Jen just scored a new Powerbook as a graduation present (and is thus finally making the switch). She had asked me for a few pointers on some Mac software that I consider productivity essentials. Here are a few of the high points, roughly categorized:

Personal Information Management:

I use Tinderbox right now primarily for my web activities, but there is a much bigger potential in terms of writing and research. While an insanely useful piece of software, there are still holes that are filled by the Devon Technologies products.

The suite of products from Devon Technologies, DevonThink and DevonAgent are also part of my work flow. I really find the ability to browse a site with DevonAgetnt, especially a journal or conference repository and suck down useful bits of information into DevonThink, where I can then classify and organize. This is a recent purchase, so I am still trying to find the best workflow for the PhD.

TeX:

Once I have the information, I need to do something with it. In my case, this usually involves writing in LaTeX. For OSX, I use TeXShop for all my TeX needs. Good editor plus handy preview is really what it is all about. Oh, and now that I am on Tiger, the editor is much snappier than it used to be thanks to the performance improvements in the new OS.

With writing comes references, and for OSX the best BibTeX editor is BibDesk. Each update gets better and better. Recent additions are auto-generation of cite keys, auto-renaming and filing of pdfs, and a quick-input tool to help fill in the bibliographic information in the first place (always the most tedious).

Equation Service is a neat OSX Service that allows you to enter a snippet of LaTeX, and produce a small PDF of the equation as output. Great for putting nice-looking equations into applications that do not support LaTeX.

General OSX:

For general ssh work, SSH Keychain keeps things organized. Quicksilver is a fantastic system tool for launching applications, among its myriad uses. SubEthaEdit is a good general-purpose editor that is free for personal use.

I'm sure there are others, but these seem to be fired up most of the time (translation: right now).

Ran across this announcement:

2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective

November 3-6, 2005, Hyatt Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia

The notion of role is ubiquitous not only in many areas of artificial intelligence, but also in many other areas of computer science, like programming languages, software engineering, coordination and databases, multiagent systems, computational linguistics and conceptual modelling, and also in other scientific fields, like formal ontology, sociology, cognitive science, organizational science and linguistics.

In sociology, on the one hand roles are often described as expected behavior of entities or agents, on the other hand roles are seen also as presentations of selves. In organizational science roles encompass more formal aspects such as rights and duties.

Three different main viewpoints characterize research on roles:

• roles as named places in relationships (especially in linguistics, databases and conceptual modelling)

• roles as dynamic classification of entities (especially in programming languages and databases)

• roles as instances to be adjoined to the entities which play the role (especially in ontologies, multiagent systems and programming languages).

Undisputed distinguishing features of roles seem to be their dependence on some other entities and their dynamic character (Sowa 1984). These properties contrast roles with the notion of natural types. Natural type seems to be essential to an entity: if an entity changes its natural type, it loses its identity; in Guarino (1992)'s terms, roles lack the rigidity which natural types possess. Masolo et al. (2004) elaborate the relational nature of roles, highlighting their definitional dependence on other concepts.

Discussions on roles are important not only to have a better understanding of theories using this notion, but also from the applicative point of view. E.g., integration of ontologies, programming languages, databases, simulation can benefit from the introduction of a well founded notion of role.

However, as, e.g., Steinmann (2000) witnesses, there is no common agreement yet about what roles are, which are their properties and how they can be modelled in a uniform way in the different areas. One likely reason is that roles are discussed in very different contexts, so that interested researchers have little opportunity to meet with each other. Even if there are events where roles are discussed, they always appear as a sub-topic within the framework of more general issues (like the AOSE workshop about agent oriented software engineering, or the recent CoOrg05 workshop at Coordination05); hence, there are few venues for research integration.

With this symposium we propose to gather researchers working across the boundaries of their subfields to explore new formal and computational techniques and research methodologies for integrating research results. For this reason this symposium will provide time for discussion besides paper presentations.

[...]

roles05 PDF

Since we can't actually afford a new laptop at the moment, I did the next best thing: upgrades. A nice surprise over the weekend was the delivery of the RAM and hard drives. I'm now running a maxxed-out 1GB of RAM and have doubled the drive space to 40GB (hey, I said I'm on a budget). The upgrade was smooth -- just a little bit of tinkering to get the RAM seated properly. The hardest part was reinstalling the new drive into the Powerbook. The little rubber grommets don't like to stay in place.

But now the Powerbook G4 / 550 I bought when I stated grad school feels a bit smoother and faster. My new OS upgrade, Tiger, should be arriving in the next day or two and we'll see what that does.

Oh, I purchased the RAM from Omni Technologies, and the hard drive from NewEgg. Ordered both mid-last week and had them by the weekend. I ordered Tiger from Apple, of course, so I could use my student discount.

This prototype represents a note that will be exported to the Web site.

Ok, that should be all the papers I have been a co-author on to date. Expect a few coming down the pipe: I am working on a journal version of the thesis. Robin and Kimon are working up some feedback -- I probably have one more review cycle before it is ready to submit. I will also be working up a dissertation proposal. I will post that once it is baked.

A preview: The thesis was focused on a distributed architecture for heterogeneous robots. It used Jini as the middleware layer, and was almost entirely written in Java. As such Jini service entries carried generic information about robot state. Or rather they were posted into the registrar to enable capability-based search for services. We were also able to hook KAoS from IHMC in to provide some software-agent services. But this was done mostly in an ad-hoc way. I want to extend this to use a more complete ontology for the domain and then define policies in KAoS that would affect task execution on the robots in the system through constraints, obligations and authorizations. So that is the general idea -- just need to figure out the angle of attack and how to place this relative to other work.

A. L. Nelson, L. Doitsidis, M. T. Long, K. P. Valavanis, and R. R. Murphy, “Incorporation of MATLAB into a Distributed Behavioral Robotics Architecture,” 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference On Intelligent Robots And Systems (IROS04), Sept. 28 - Oct. 2, 2004, Sendai, Japan. [pdf]

Abstract—This paper presents a method that integrates MATLAB into a distributed behavioral robotics architecture. The architecture is written in Java and uses the Jini platform for distributed object registration, lookup and remote method invocation. The method described here can be used to integrate MATLAB into any Java-based behavioral architecture. The form of the integration allows a running MATLAB workspace to be accessed as a distributed object within the larger Java/Jini-based architecture. This is beneficial because MATLAB scripts and functions may be called in interpreted form and can make full use of MATLAB tool boxes and have access to the MATLAB workspace environment. This is not possible when MATLAB scripts are compiled into stand-alone C++, Java or p-code. The use of the architecture is demonstrated on an iRobot ATRV-JR robot and remote computer workstation. Experiments have been conducted to quantify GPS and odometry errors in outdoor environments using automated methods supported by the distributed architecture.

L. Doitsidis, A. L. Nelson, K. P. Valavanis, M. T. Long, R. R. Murphy. Experimental Validation of a MATLAB Based Control Architecture for Multiple Robot Outdoor Navigation, Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Intelligent Control 13th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, 2005. In publication. [pdf]

Abstract— Design, implementation and experimental validation of a MATLAB based autonomous robot control framework is presented, supported by, and integrated into a distributed field robot architecture known as distributed-SFX. The MATLAB based framework is composed of multi sensor fuzzy logic robot controllers that utilize laser, GPS and odometer data, fusing such sensor data and filtering out noise, to improve collision free navigation. Extensive outdoor environment experiments with single and multiple mobile robots are performed to demonstrate waypoint and goal point navigation, and raster scan search patterns in unknown environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Results and videos are provided to justify the proposed approach.

Not mine though, fortunately. Aaron got a job with Ocean Optics, working on the device drivers for some small inexpensive sensing devices. Since Aaron's working on the code, it they should have a good set of drivers for Windows, OS X, and Linux -- hopefully we can adapt some of the sensors for the robotics program at school. It might be useful to have a small sensor on the front of an Inuktun that can sense a variety of hazardous environments (such as arsenic), might it not?

But today was pretty easy -- we got him moved over in one trip. Aaron has maybe two heavy pieces of furniture. It is simple to move someone that doesn't even own a bed.

His new place is nice, a large one bedroom apartment in Dunedin, just a few miles from his office. Since he is in Dunedin, he is also just a few miles from the beach. Not too shabby.

I've been reading "the Zen of CSS design: visual enlightenment for the web" by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag. The books walks through a selection of design examples from the web site. The examples highlight (and are divided into) major areas of design: layout, typography, imagery, and special effects. I must say that the designs shown in the book are pretty phenomenal -- like all designs there are some I like more than others, but can appreciate the artistry even in those I am not so fond of.

Unfortunately for those who have stumbled across this site, I have very little visual art ability -- note the preponderance of very simple shapes.

Long, Matthew T., Creating a distributed field robot architecture for multiple robots. Master’s thesis, University of South Florida, November 2004. [pdf]

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a distributed robot architecture, Distributed Field Robot Architecture. The approach taken in this thesis is threefold. First, the distributed architecture builds on existing hybrid deliberative/reactive architectures used for individual robots rather than creating a distributed architecture that requires re-engineering of existing robots. Second, the distributed layer of the architecture incorporates concepts from artificial intelligence and software agents. Third, the architecture is designed around Suns Jini middleware layer, rather than creating a middleware layer from scratch or attempting to adapt a software agent architecture.

This thesis makes three primary contributions, both theoretical and practical, to intelligent robotics. First, the thesis defines key characteristics of a distributed robot architecture. Second, this thesis describes, implements, and validates a distributed robot architecture. Third, the implementation with a team of mobile ground robots interacting with an external software “mission controller” agent in a complex, outdoor task is itself a contribution.

The architecture is validated with three existence proofs. First, an example is presented to show the implementation of a basic sensor service. Second, a basic behavior is presented to validate the reactive portion of the architecture. Finally, an intelligent agent is presented to validate the deliberative layer of the architecture and describe the integration with the distributed layer.

Read a little bit about ensembles and ensemble creation for class. [pdf]. The point behind ensembles is to create a number of classifiers, then evaluate an instance on all classifiers. The overall output of the ensemble is some function of the individual results, and is (hopefully) of a higher accuracy. The trick is creating the ensemble.

The paper describes a comparison of bagging (bootstrap aggregation) versus boosting and several random subspace / random tree / random forest variants.

The big point of the paper is that no one method is a sure-fire win versus bagging. Random-forests are significantly better sometimes, but have a significant loss (in the statistical sense). However, one key feature of the random-forest algorithms is that they are very fast, since they pick a random subset of features for evaluation. This can be a big win on data sets with large feature vectors. Genomic data, for example, has 65,000+ features -- it is computationally very slow to evaluate all features.

All that said, it is worth looking into building ensembles of classifiers to improve performance.

"Distributed Multi-Agent Diagnosis and Recovery from Sensor Failures," Long, M., Murphy, R., and Parker, L., also appears as IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems(IROS), Vol. 3, pp. 2506-2513, October 2003. [pdf]

Abstract—This paper presents work extending previous research in sensor fault tolerance, classification, and recovery from a single robot to a heterogeneous team of distributed robots. This approach allows teams of robots to share knowledge about the working environment, sensor and task state, to diagnose failures and also communicate to redistribute tasks in the event that a robot becomes inoperable. Our work presents several novel extensions to prior art: distributed fault handling and task management in a dynamic, distributed Java framework. This research was implemented and demonstrated on robots in a lab environment performing a simplified search operation.

"Affective Task Allocation for Distributed Multi-Robot Teams", A. Gage, R. Murphy, K. P. Valavanis, M. Long also submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics. [pdf]

Abstract— This article presents a novel emotion-based recruitment approach to the multi-robot task allocation problem. This approach requires less communication bandwidth than auction methods, enabling it to scale to large team sizes, and making it appropriate for low-power or stealth applications. Affective recruitment is tolerant of unreliable communications channels, and can find better solutions than simple greedy schedulers (based on experimental metrics of the time necessary to complete recruitment and the total number of messages transmitted). Experimental results in simulation and on three UGVs and one UAV in a mine-detection task show that affective recruitment succeeds with network failure rates up to 25% and requires 32% fewer transmissions compared to existing methods on average. Affective recruitment also scales better with team size, requiring up to 61% fewer transmissions than a greedy instantaneous scheduler that has an O(n) communications complexity, without a significant increase in allocation time.

"Validation of a Distributed Field Robot Architecture Integrated with a MATLAB Based Control Theoretic Environment: A Case Study of Fuzzy Logic Based Robot Navigation", K. P. Valavanis, A. L. Nelson, L. Doitsidis, M. Long, R. R. Murphy also submitted to IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine. [pdf]

The paper presents fundamental aspects of a multi layer, hybrid, deliberative and reactive Distributed Field Robot Architecture (DFRA) that has been designed to support functionality of heterogeneous teams of unmanned (ground and aerial) robot vehicles. The DFRA is implemented in Java using Jini to manage distributed objects, services and modules between robots and other system components. It is interfaced with a control theoretic MATLAB environment, which is supported and integrated into the Java based framework using the JMatLink Java class library. This allows modules and services implemented as native interpreted MATLAB code to be accessed as remote and distributed objects. The combination of the Java based distributed architecture and the use of MATLAB in its interpreted form for autonomous robot navigation and control is a unique aspect of the reported research.

Experimental validation of the DFRA and its MATLAB integration is demonstrated by implementing simple prototype support modules for robot navigation. These modules include: i) a time-history laser filter module; ii) a heuristic GPS-based pose detection module; iii) fuzzy logic controllers that utilize laser, GPS and odometer data as inputs. Navigation experiments in the field utilize single and multiple robots and included scenarios in which a single robot navigated through an environment with many unknown obstacles to reach a distant goal location, and scenarios in which robots executed search routines by traveling through sets of way points. Robots negotiated both static obstacles and dynamic obstacles including other robots.

"Distributed Error Handling and HRI," B. Zimmel, M. Long, J. Carlson, R. Murphy, also to appear in 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2004. [pdf]

Abstract—The implementations of a distributed, autonomous error handler (EH) and a human-robot interface (HRI) are presented. The interface is combined with the EH to allow a human operator to see that a failure has occurred on a robot and whether or not it has been served by the EH. An experiment was run to test how well the EH and the interface work together, as well as the usefulness of the EH. The results were inconclusive, although the EH and interface worked together successfully.

"Application of the Distributed Field Robot Architecture to a Simulated Demining Task", Matt Long, Aaron Gage, Robin Murphy and Kimon Valavanis also to appear in "2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Barcelona, Spain". [pdf]

Abstract—As mobile robot teams become more complex, it is necessary to develop a control architecture to manage the resources present in the team. The Distributed Field Robot Architecture (DFRA) is a distributed, object-oriented implementation of the SFX hybrid robot architecture that allows for dynamic discovery and acquisition of robot resources and the seamless integration of humans and artificial agents in the robot team. This paper introduces the DFRA and details its application to a high-fidelity demining scenario using a heterogeneous team of ground and aerial robots.

This prototype represents a note that will be exported to the Web site.

Oddly enough, we got re-acquainted with a gentleman we met about a year ago: Edgar and his wife Sophia.

He introduced me to a gentleman Joe Griffin? that has some sort of experimental robot skeleton.

Also found out about Gala Corina. The event opens Friday, Nov 5 (5pm-11pm) and runs through Nov 20. Apparently they have renovated an old Badcock furniture showroom in downtown at 1219 North Franklin Street. Edgar, in particular, wanted to get Hannah down on opening night to meet musicians. This is possibly what she needs to start meeting some people to sing with!

From the website:

Gala Corina: A Brief History

The Gala Corina began in 1999 as a group of architects and artists who had a desire to show their work but wanted to remain outside of the traditional gallery structure.

While the individual work of these artists was completely diverse, the group was unified in an understanding that all artistic endeavors are related to each other through the creative spirit. Passion and rigor, tempered by a continuously evolving dialogue among craftsmen, were shared goals with the intent of sharing knowledge and encouraging motivation.

Our first art show in early November 1999, held at Palmetto Beach's historic Corina Cigar Factory set the tone, time, and continuing title for future shows. In a truly grassroots fashion, 22 artists presented painting, drawing, architecture, furniture, photography, sculpture, and spoken word to a crowd of 500 responsive supporters.

One memorable comment was "…fantastic, this is exactly what Tampa needs, …passion for art with an innocence to the art machine." It was then decided by all involved that the Gala Corina should continue as an annual event."

Going to an art / performance thing at a local gallery. Here's the blurb:

"Curators Wendy Babcox and Ryan Berg bring their respective projects Slapdown! and Chariot to the main room for a double-billed opening night of spectacle, costume, Rock n Roll and women wrestlers. A one night only opening reception and performance of both the costumed glam rock cover band Chariot as well as the rabble rousing wrestling women of Slapdown! is the heart of this show and is not to be missed. The remainder of this month long exhibition will focus on the documentation of the performance itself as well as it’s remnants, touching ideas of natural and unnatural history, alter egos and their biography, and the relationship between art, performance, and the fuzzy spaces in between. Tattered and recreated costumes, photographic portraits of the performers, and the inevitable yet carefully produced event-related merchandise will fill the gallery, as well as large scale multimedia documentation of the show itself. "

Gallery address: 4606 N Florida Ave, Tampa, FL 33603

It looks like there are only a few rules that apply to us:

1) We should take a Premarital Preparation Course and read the online guide to marriage.

2) We both need to show up with valid picture ID

3) It will cost $93.50 without the course noted above, $61.00 with the course.

More information at the HC Tax Collector site, which lists prices oddly different from the above.

Ah, looks like an even better source is the Clerk of Circuit Court.

Found this on the web:

So George is doing yet another photo op at an elementary school, and this one’s been going pretty well, so he offers to take questions. A little boy raises his hand.

“I have five questions,” Steve says. “First, why did you go to war without UN approval? Second, why are you president when Gore got more votes? Third, where’s Osama bin Laden? Fourth, why did the bell for recess ring twenty minutes early? And fifth, what happened to Billy?”

Well, the new home of RoboTHOR.com is in the birthing process. This is created using Tinderbox, using a sample template to start with, so expect changes...