Quantitative studies of the impact of various modes of communication on the societal performance for each of these configurations is being performed. Most recently, this study explores the tradeoffs present in multi-agent robotic teams in order to provide a design theory allowing for the specification of numbers of agents, forms of communication, and societal organization for a variety of task environments. Another project involves entirely new methods for guiding an arm-equipped mobile vehicle using reactive control in a dynamic and unstructured environment. Jacobians are used to compute the forces and torques at each joint. Current work focuses on further integration of qualitative symbolic approaches to deliberative planning and numerical methods for reactive control.
Current work focuses on further integration of deliberative learning and reactive control.
This allows robotic behavior to change in response to available fuel reserves, internal temperatures, and other important factors. This permits the avoidance of worst case scenario analysis. Several subtasks are involved. The first studies the use of ultrasonic sensing for navigation and drum recognition in a highly specular environment. The next task involves developing vision algorithms on a transputer architecture for corridor following.