38878591
Social and Individual Commitment
Agents interacting in team environments make use of a social structure which, Castelfranchi has recently claimed, must be modelled by commitments which are external to any particular agent. Such social commitments are between agents, though usually with respect to some action or state which the committed agent is prepared to perform or achieve. We start with Castelfranchi's concept of social commitment and formalise aspects of it within the BDI agent framework. We use this formalisation to characterise different sorts of social behaviour in the interaction between agents.
27820977
A Monotonic Formalism for Events and Systems of Events
The aim of this paper is to provide a basis for a theory of events and systems of events that can be used for reasoning about arbitrarily complex dynamic domains involving multiple agents. The approach is based on a model of events that explicitly represents the domain of influence of each event By restricting the scope of an event's domain of influence, most of the problems that have seriously troubled the more conventional state-transition models of events can be avoided. The effect of performing events, either in isolation or in parallel with other events, is described. A formalism is developed that allows reasoning about arbitrarily complex behaviours. It is shown how this formalism avoids the frame problem yet allows the ramifications of any given event occurrence to be modelled without the introduction of non-monotonic mechanisms. Finally, the notion of system is introduced to provide a compositional means for reasoning about complex
15317926
Planned Team Activity
Agents situated in dynamic environments can be supplied in advance with a repertoire of plans that permit them to rapidly generate appropriate sequences of actions in response to important events. When agents can form teams, new problems emerge regarding the representation and execution of joint actions. In this paper we introduce a language for representing joint plans for teams of agents, we describe how agents can organize the formation of a suitably skilled team to achieve a joint goal, and we explain how such a team can execute these plans to generate complex, synchronized team activity. The formalism provides a framework for representing and reasoning about joint actions in which various approaches to co-ordination and commitment can be explored.
6556030
A pivoting gripper for feeding industrial parts
To be cost effective and highly precise, many industrial assembly robots have only four degrees of freedom (DOF) plus a binary pneumatic gripper. Such robots commonly permit parts to be rotated only about a vertical axis. However it is often necessary to reorient parts about other axes prior to assembly. In this paper the authors describe a way to orient parts about an arbitrary axis by introducing a rotating bearing between the jaws of a simple gripper. Based on this mechanism, the authors are developing a rapidly configurable vision-based system for feeding parts. In this system, a camera determines initial part pose; the robot then reorients the part to achieve a desired final pose. The authors have implemented a prototype version in their laboratory using a commercially-available robot system.<<ETX>>
11388485
The number of reachable pairs in a digraph
For a digraph G, let R(G) (respectively, R^(^k^)(G)) be the number of ordered pairs (u,v) of vertices of G such that u v and v is reachable from u (respectively, reachable from u by a path of length ==k+(k+1)^0^.^5^7+2, for arbitrary k.
45536366
On joint Weibull probability density functions
Two important results for the joint probability density function of the Weibull distribution are derived.
694579
Placing registration marks
The registration mark problem is defined, as follows. Given an n-sided rigid planar polygonal part and a set of k planar geometric transforms, locate a point on the surface of the part that maximizes the minimum distance between transformed points. A registration mark at this point will be maximally robust to sensor imperfections. An O(n log/sup 2/k+k/sup 4/ log k log*k) time algorithm for solving this planar problem is given, and the result is demonstrated using the Image-Calc vision system. The results extend to curved planar parts and polyhedral parts. How part shape can be redesigned to simplify localization is considered. In essence, it is shown how to design the surface of a part to facilitate automated assembly.<<ETX>>