Exploiting domain geometry in analogical route planning
Automated route planning consists of using real maps to automatically find good map routes. Two shortcomings to standard methods are (1) that domain information may be lacking, and (2) that a ‘good’ route can be hard to define. Most on-line map representations do not include information that may be relevant for the purpose of generating good realistic routes, such as traffic patterns, construction, and one-way streets. The notion of a good route is dependent not only on geometry (shortest path),but also on a variety of other factors, such as the day and time, weather conditions,and perhaps most importantly,user-dependent preferences. These features can be learned by evaluating real-world execution experience. These difficulties motivate our work on applying analogical reasoning to route planning. Analogical reasoning is a method of using past experience to improve problem solving performance in similar new situations.Our approach consists of the accumulation and reuse of previously traversed rou...

title: Plays as Effective Multiagent Plans Enabling Opponent-Adaptive Play Selection
abstract: Coordinated action for a team of robots is a challenging problem, especially in dynamic, unpredictable environments. Robot soccer is an instance of a domain where well defined goals need to be achieved by multiple executors in an adversarial setting. Such domains offer challenging multiagent planning problems that need to coordinate multiagent execution in response to other agents that are not part of our team plans. In this work, we introduce the concept of a play as a multiagent plan that combines both reactive principles, which are the focus of traditional approaches for coordinating robot actions, and deliberative principles. We further introduce the concept of a playbook as a method for seamlessly combining multiple team plans. The playbook provides a set of alternative team behaviors which form the basis for our third contribution of play adaptation. We describe how these concepts were concretely implemented in the CMDragons robot soccer team. We also show empirical results indicating the importance of adaptation in adversarial or other unpredictable environments.

title: Task Decomposition, Dynamic Role Assignment, and Low-Bandwidth Communication for Real-Time Strategic Teamwork
abstract: Multi-agent domains consisting of teams of agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment offer challenging research opportunities. In this article, we introduce periodic team synchronization (PTS) domains as time-critical environments in which agents act autonomously with low communication, but in which they can periodically synchronize in a full-communication setting. The two main contributions of this article are a flexible team agent structure and a method for inter-agent communication. First, the team agent structure allows agents to capture and reason about team agreements. We achieve collaboration between agents through the introduction of formations. A formation decomposes the task space defining a set of roles. Homogeneous agents can flexibly switch roles within formations, and agents can change formations dynamically, according to pre-defined triggers to be evaluated at run-time. This flexibility increases the performance of the overall team. Our teamwork structure further includes pre-planning for frequently occurring situations. Second, the communication method is designed for use during the low-communication periods in PTS domains. It overcomes the obstacles to inter-agent communication in multi-agent environments with unreliable, single-channel, high-cost, low-bandwidth communication. We fully implemented both the flexible teamwork structure and the communication method in the domain of simulated robotic soccer, and conducted controlled empirical experiments to verify their effectiveness. In addition, our simulator team made it to the semi-finals of the RoboCup-97 competition, in which 29 teams participated. It achieved a total score of 67–9 over six different games, and successfully demonstrated its flexible teamwork structure and inter-agent communication.

title: A Formalization of Equilibria for Multiagent Planning
abstract: Planning has traditionally focused on single agent systems. Although planning domain languages have been extended to multiagent domains, solution concepts have not. Previous solution concepts either focus on planning for teams of agents with a single goal, or on a single agent in an environment containing other agents with unknown and unpredictable behavior. In reality other agents are usually acting to achieve their own explicit goals, which may not be the same or even related. In game theory the notion of an equilibria provides a framework for thinking about self-interested, utility maximizing agents. We define a formalization of the multiagent nondeterministic planning problem and introduce a notion of equilibria inspired by the game theoretic concept. As far as we know, this is the first solution framework that explicitly accounts for the various goals of all agents. In addition to the formalization we also demonstrate how this framework applies in a number of different domains.

title: Motion Control in Dynamic Multi-Robot Environments
abstract: This paper presents the motion control system used by CMUnited-98, the small-size league champion at RoboCup-98. The robotic soccer team consists of five robots that aim at achieving specific goals while navigating in a limited space shared with the five other opponent robots. We introduce our motion control algorithm, which allows a general differential-driven robot to accurately reach a target point with a desired orientation in an environment with multiple moving obstacles. We describe how the features of our motion controller help to build interesting and robust behaviors. We also briefly compare our system to other motion control techniques and include descriptions and illustrations of the performance of our fully-implemented motion control algorithm.

title: Real-Time Randomized Path Planning for Robot Navigation
abstract: Mobile robots often must find a trajectory to another position in their environment, subject to constraints. This is the problem of planning a path through a continuous domain Rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs) are a recently developed representation on which fast continuous domain path planners can be based. In this work, we build a path planning system based on RRTs that interleaves planning and execution, first evaluating it in simulation and then applying it to physical robots. Our planning algorithm, ERRT (execution extended RRT), introduces two novel extensions of previous RRT work, the waypoint cache and adaptive cost penalty search, which improve replanning efficiency and the quality of generated paths. ERRT is successfully applied to a real-time multi-robot system. Results demonstrate that ERRT is significantly more efficient for replanning than a basic RRT planner, performing competitively with or better than existing heuristic and reactive real-time path planning approaches. ERRT is a significant step forward with the potential for making path planning common on real robots, even in challenging continuous, highly dynamic domains.

title: A Case-Based Approach for Indoor Location
abstract: Location is an important dimension for context-awareness in ubiquitous devices. Nowadays different techniques are used alone or together to determine the position of a person or object. One aspect of the problem concerns to indoor location. Various authors propose the analysis of Radio Frequency (RF) footprints. 
 
In this paper we defend that case-based reasoning can make an important contribution for location from RF footprints. We apply an empirical dissimilarity metric for footprint retrieval and compare this approach with the results obtained with a neural network and C5.0 learning algorithms. 
 
The RF footprints are obtained from a Global System for Mobile Communications and General Packet Radio Service (GSM/GPRS) network. Signals from these networks are particularly complex when compared to the ones obtained from WiFi or Bluetooth networks.

title: Automatic Clustering of Faces in Meetings
abstract: Meetings are an integral part of business life for any organization. In previous work, we have developed a physical awareness system called CAMEO (camera assisted meeting event observer) to record and process the audio/visual information of a meeting. An important task in meeting understanding is to know who and how many people are attending the meeting. In this paper, we present an automatic approach to detect, track, and cluster people's faces in long video sequences. This is a challenging problem due to the appearance variability of people's faces (illumination, expression, pose,...). Two main novelties are presented: a robust real-time adaptive subspace face tracker which combines color and appearance. A temporal subspace clustering algorithm. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed system is demonstrated over a data set of long videos (i.e. 1 hour).

title: Oracular Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes: A Very Special Case
abstract: We introduce the oracular partially observable Markov decision process (OPOMDP), a type of POMDP in which the world produces no observations; instead there is an "oracle," available in any state, that tells the agent its exact state for a fixed cost. The oracle may be a human or a highly accurate sensor. At each timestep the agent must choose whether to take a domain-level action or consult the oracle. This formulation comprises a factorization between information-gathering actions and domain-level actions, allowing us to characterize the value of information and to examine the problem of planning under uncertainty from a novel perspective. We propose an algorithm to capitalize on this factorization and the special structure of the OPOMDP, and we test the algorithm's performance on a new sample domain. On this new domain, we are able to solve a problem with hundreds of thousands of action-states and vastly outperform a previous state-of-the-art approximate technique