4 Simulated Experimentation
4.2 Robot Collaboration
Although there are many different approaches of collaborations in robot stud-ies, we consider the collaboration as sharing a task among a group of robots.
For instance, a generated task can be further refined into a set of subtask, which will be carried out by each individual robot. The system generates a set of tasks or subtasks by the task planning mechanism, which will be described in the below.
4.2.1 Task Planning Rules
The task planning rules for collaboration layer is divided into two levels, high level planning rules (general task rules), and the low-level planning rules (robot-specific action rules). The general task rule can generate set of tasks, and the robot specific action rule can generate a set of actions to perform the task. For example, if
‘cleaning’ is the selected context, then task planner generates a set of tasks for the ‘cleaning’ as ‘sweeping’, and ‘mopping’. When the task ‘sweeping’ is assigned to a robot, the generated action plan is ‘move’, ‘lift’, ‘sweep’, and ‘release’. The task planner works on the server side, and the action planner is located on the client side. The sample task planning rules are as in the Table2.
4.2.2 Multi-level Planning
Our system divides the planning mechanism in two levels, a high-level planning and low-level planning. It is a kind of hierarchical planning mechanism that is efficient enough to make the planning mechanism as simple as possible. The high-level planner generates a set of subtasks to accomplish a given context, and saves them in a stack that will be taken one by one by the low-level planner. When the high-level planning is done, the low-level planner gets activated with each one of the subtasks. A single subtask becomes a goal to accomplish in the low-level planning process, and it generates a set of actions as a result.
Table 2 Task planning rules
High-level planning rules Low-level planning rules If (Context¼‘Cleaning’) then (NeedTask
Sweeping, Mopping)
If (Task¼‘Sweeping’) then (NeedAction (Move, Lift, Sweeping, Release)) If (Context¼‘Serving’) then (NeedTask
(Take_order, Food_service, Check_out)). . ..
If (Task¼‘Take_order’) then (NeedAction (Give_Menu, Help_order)). . ..
2 A Framework for Collaborative Aspects of Intelligent Service Robot 27
5 Conclusion
In this paper, we have described a development of intelligent robot framework for providing intelligent service in the context awareness environment. The signifi-cances of our research could be as follows.
First, we have designed intelligent service robot framework and successfully carried out simulated experimentation by generating several robot instances. The several heterogeneous robot instances can be generated by the user, through the user interface windows, as many as possible. Second, the robots are grouped by the decision classifier based on the entropy metric of the information theory.
This approach will provide more reliable and systematic methods for the robot grouping. Third, in this study, we consider the collaboration as follows. Once a task is generated, then it gets refined into a set of subtasks, which will be assigned to each individual robot. If each robot accomplishes its own subtask, then the original task is being done as a result. We do not have any interaction among the robot at the moment. Fourth, the generation of task is being done by the multi-level task allocation planning mechanism. The high-level task planning is done on the server side, and detailed action planning is done on the client side (robot).
Our approach may provide some useful solutions for the intelligent service oriented applications, which require multiple robot instances. Our immediate next work is to complete the development of context-awareness layer using sensed raw data from the external physical computing devices. Therefore, when we complete the development of the entire framework, we are going to setup experimentations with several humanoid robots equipped with sensors and network communications.
Also, more detailed strategy and also interaction for collaboration among each individual robot is needed.
Acknowledgement This work was supported by the Seoul R&BD program (10848) of Korea.
References
1. M. Weiser. The computer for the twenty-first century. Sci. Am.265(3), 94–104 (1991) 2. G.K. Mostefaoui, J. Pasquier-Rocha, P. Brezillon, Context-aware computing: a guide for the
pervasive computing community. Proc. IEEE/ACS Int. Conf. Pervasive Serv. (ICPS’04) 19(23), 39–48 (2004)
3. A.K. Dey, G.D. Abowd, Towards a better understanding of context and context-awareness.
GVU Technical Report GIT-GVU-99-22, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1999
4. M. Baldauf, S. Dustdar, A Survey on context-aware systems. Int. J. Adhoc Ubiquitous Comput.2, 263–277 (2004)
5. H. Chen, An intelligent broker architecture for pervasive context-aware systems. Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, 2004
6. T. Gu, H.K. Pung, D.Q. Zhang, A Service-oriented middleware for building context-aware services. J. Netw. Comput. Appl.28, 1–18 (2005)
7. D. Salber, A. Dey, G. Abowd, The context toolkit: aiding the development of context-enabled applications, inProceedings of CHI’99, Pittsburgh, PA, 1999, pp. 434–441
28 J. Suh and C.‐W. Woo
8. X.H. Wang, T. Gu, D.Q. Zhang, H.K. Pung, Ontology based context modeling and reasoning using owl, inProceedings of 2nd IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, PERCOMW’04, Orlando, Florida, USA, 2004, pp. 18–22 9. D. Rodic, A.P. Engelbrecht, Social network as a coordination techniques for multi-robot
systems. International conference on system design and applications, Springer, Berlin, 2003, pp. 503–513
10. T.H. Labella, M. Dorigo, J-L. Deneubourg, Self-organized task allocation in a group of robots.
Technical Report No. TR/IRIDIA/2004–6, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2004
11. M. Mataric, S. Sukhatme, E. Ostergaard, Multi-robot task allocation in Uncertain Environ-ment. Auton. Robots14, 255–263 (2003)
12. M. Sterns, N. Windelinckx Combining planning with reinforcement learning for multi-robot task allocation. inProceedings of adaptive agents and MASII, LNAI 3394, 2006, pp. 260–274 13. R. Alami, A. Clodic, V Montreuil, E. Akin, R. Chatila, Task planning for human-robot interaction, in Proceedings of the 2005 joint conference on Smart Object and ambient intelligence, 2005, pp. 81–85
14. B. Gerkey, and M. Mataric, Principled communication for dynamic multi-robot task alloca-tion. Exp. RoboticsII, 353–362 (2000)
15. C.E. Shannon,The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, Illinois, 1949)
16. M.A. Goodrich, E.R. Boer, J.W. Crandall, R.W. Ricks, M.L. Quigley, Behavioral entropy in human-robot interaction, Brigham University, Technical Report ADA446467, 2004 17. T. Balch, Hierarchic social entropy: an information theoretic measure of robot group diversity.
Auton. Robots8, 09–237 (2000)
2 A Framework for Collaborative Aspects of Intelligent Service Robot 29