marina@ai.toronto.edu (Marina Haloulos) (10/24/89)
ACTIVITIES FOR THE WEEK COMMENCING OCTOBER 30
(SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road)
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COLLOQUIUM
SF1105, at 11:00 a.m., Tuesday 31 October 1989
Professor Rodney A. Brooks
MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Robot Beings
Being a robot in a human habitat requires dealing with cluttered,
unconstrained and dynamically changing environments. Most research on
autonomous mobile robots assumes a static world. At best, dynamic aspects
of the world are to be avoided. We report on a series of robots built over
the last four years designed to operate in dynamic environments.
These robots cannot be dynamically told what to do. Rather, like children
and dogs, they do what is in their nature (which is determined by programs
residing onboard in LEPRUMs on power up). They pursue their own activities
while responding to the presence and actions of nearby people.
The robots bristle with sensors. But rather than fuse the data from these
sensors into a world model, the robots have many independent perceptual
systems which are individually and intimately tied into behavior-generating
networks of simple ocmputational elements. Each perceptual subsystem
extracts only those aspects of the world which are relevant to the
particular task for which it is tuned. Fusion happens closer to the motor
level than the sensor level. The robots use the subsumption architecutre
which is a methodology for implementing complex agents as an incrementally
evolved network of augmented finite state machiens (FSMs with timers).
In building such robots we have rejected the traditional AI approaches
based on symbolic representations, and instead rely on large collections of
carefully designed behavior generators to produce coherent complex patterns
of interacting with the world.