The Cognitive Robotics Team is currently establishing a new robot lab with a small fleet of mobile robots communicating over a wireless network. The robots are equipped with stereoscopic cameras, and the team is currently developing axiomatic descriptions of occlusion events between objects in a visual field. Dr. Yiannis Demiris has recently joined the IIS section from the University of Edinburgh Mobile Robots Group. Khepera robots to test many ideas arising from the use of abductive reasoning and the Event Calculus as it is applied to robotics. The multiple robots will be used to perform shared tasks such as planning, map-building and data gathering and interpretation.
Electronic worlds integrate multiple means of communication between people and artificial Agents.
The research of this team is two-fold, first to develop and investigate the nature of the visible, character, Agents, and secondly to establish functional software agent architectures and platforms in which these virtual character Agents will operate in the context of existing and emerging telecommunications and internet infrastructures. Prof. Mamdani's research team participates in four E.U. funded projects related to these issues. Dr. Jeremy Pitt's Agent Research Team explores situations where computational intelligence is encapsulated in Agents that are owned by, delegated to and represent people and real organisations in electronic societies of Agents. This, in turn, means that electronic Agents will be required to adopt many aspects of the normal social and business conventions in the interactions they undertake on the behalf of those individuals and organisations. This analogy between natural human intelligence and artificial Agent intelligence touches on many different aspects of communication and interaction.