# All Publications

• investigate properties of well-supported models of 4QL
• prove the correctness of the algorithm for computing well-supported models
• show that 4QL has PTIME data complexity and captures PTIME.
[446] Alexander Kleiner and Christian Dornhege. 2011. Mapping for the Support of First Responders in Critical Domains. Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 64(1):7–31. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s10846-010-9520-x. In critical domains such as urban search and rescue (USAR), and bomb disposal, the deployment of teleoperated robots is essential to reduce the risk of first responder personnel. Teleoperation is a difficult task, particularly when controlling robots from an isolated safety zone. In general, the operator has to solve simultaneously the problems of mission planning, target identification, robot navigation, and robot control. We introduce a system to support teleoperated navigation with real-time mapping consisting of a two-step scan matching method that re-considers data associations during the search. The algorithm processes data from laser range finder and gyroscope only, thereby it is independent from the robot platform. Furthermore, we introduce a user-guided procedure for improving the global consistency of maps generated by the scan matcher. Globally consistent maps are computed by a graph-based maximum likelihood method that is biased by localizing crucial parts of the scan matcher trajectory on a prior given geo-tiff image. The approach has been implemented as an embedded system and extensively tested on robot platforms designed for teleoperation in critical situations, such as bomb disposal. Furthermore, the system was evaluated in a test maze by first responders during the Disaster City event in Texas 2008. [445] R. Kümmerle, B. Steder, C. Dornhege, Alexander Kleiner, G. Grisetti and W. Burgard. 2011. Large Scale Graph-based SLAM using Aerial Images as Prior Information. Autonomous Robots, 30(1):25–39. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s10514-010-9204-1. The problem of learning a map with a mobile robot has been intensively studied in the past and is usually referred to as the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. However, most existing solutions to the SLAM problem learn the maps from scratch and have no means for incorporating prior information. In this paper, we present a novel SLAM approach that achieves global consistency by utilizing publicly accessible aerial photographs as prior information. It inserts correspondences found between stereo and three-dimensional range data and the aerial images as constraints into a graph-based formulation of the SLAM problem. We evaluate our algorithm based on large real-world datasets acquired even in mixed in- and outdoor environments by comparing the global accuracy with state-of-the-art SLAM approaches and GPS. The experimental results demonstrate that the maps acquired with our method show increased global consistency. [444] Alexander Kleiner, B. Nebel and V. Ziparo. 2011. A Mechanism for Dynamic Ride Sharing based on Parallel Auctions. In 22th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pages 266–272. Car pollution is one of the major causes of green- house emissions, and traffic congestion is rapidly becoming a social plague. Dynamic Ride Sharing (DRS) systems have the potential to mitigate this problem by computing plans for car drivers, e.g. commuters, allowing them to share their rides. Ex- isting efforts in DRS are suffering from the problem that participants are abandoning the system after repeatedly failing to get a shared ride. In this paper we present an incentive compatible DRS solution based on auctions. While existing DRS systems are mainly focusing on fixed assignments that minimize the totally travelled distance, the presented approach is adaptive to individual preferences of the participants. Furthermore, our system allows to tradeoff the minimization of Vehicle Kilometers Travelled (VKT) with the overall probability of successful ride-shares, which is an important feature when bootstrapping the system. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present a DRS solution based on auctions using a sealed-bid second price scheme. [443] Q. Hamp, L. Reindl and Alexander Kleiner. 2011. Lessons Learned from German Research for USAR. In IEEE Int. Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR). Note: Winner of the Young Author’s Award We present lessons learned in USAR research within the framework of the German research project I-LOV. After three years of development first field tests have been carried out by professionals such as the Rapid Deployment Unit for Salvage Operations Abroad (SEEBA). We present results from evaluating search teams in simulated USAR scenarios equipped with newly developed technical search means and digital data input terminals developed in the I- LOV project. In particular, the â€œbioradarâ€, a ground-penetrating radar system for the detection of humanoid movements, a semi-active video probe for rubble pile exploration of more than 10 m length, and the decision support system FRIEDAA were evaluated and compared with conventional search methods. Results of this evaluation indicate that the developed technologies foster advantages in USAR, which are discussed in this paper. [442] A. Kolling, Alexander Kleiner, M. Lewis and K. Sycara. 2011. Computing and Executing Strategies for Moving Target Search. In IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 4246–4253. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2011.5980277. We address the problem of searching for moving targets in large outdoor environments represented by height maps. To solve the problem we present a complete system that computes from an annotated height map a graph representation and search strategies based on worst-case assumptions about all targets. These strategies are then used to compute a schedule and task assignment for all agents. We improve the graph construction from previous work and for the first time present a method that computes a schedule to minimize the execution time. For this we consider travel times of agents determined by a path planner on the height map. We demonstrate the entire system in a real environment with an area of 700,000m2 in which eight human agents search for two intruders using mobile computing devices (iPads). To the best of our knowledge this is the first demonstration of a search system applied to such a large environment. [441] D. Meyer-Delius, M. Beinhofer, Alexander Kleiner and W. Burgard. 2011. Using artificial landmarks to reduce the ambiguity in the environment of a mobile robot. In IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 5173–5178. DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2011.5980111. Robust and reliable localization is a fundamental prerequisite for many applications of mobile robots. Although there exist many solutions to the localization problem, structurally symmetrical or featureless environments can prevent different locations from being distinguishable given the data obtained with the robot’s sensors. Such ambiguities typically make localization approaches more likely to fail. In this paper, we investigate how artificial landmarks can be utilized to reduce the ambiguity in the environment. We present a practical approach to compute a configuration of indistinguishable landmarks that decreases the overall ambiguity and thus increases the robustness of the localization process. We evaluate our approach in different environments based on real data and in simulation. Our results demonstrate that our approach improves the localization performance of the robot and outperforms other landmark selection approaches. [440] Alexander Kleiner, D. Sun and D. Meyer-Delius. 2011. ARMO - Adaptive Road Map Optimization for Large Robot Teams. In IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 3276–3282. IEEE conference proceedings. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2011.6048339. Autonomous robot teams that simultaneously dispatch transportation tasks are playing more and more an important role in present logistic centers and manufacturing plants. In this paper we consider the problem of robot motion planning for large robot teams in the industrial domain. We present adaptive road map optimization (ARMO) that is capable of adapting the road map in real time whenever the environment has changed. Based on linear programming, ARMO computes an optimal road map according to current environmental constraints (including human whereabouts) and the current demand for transportation tasks from loading stations in the plant. For detecting dynamic changes, the environment is describe by a grid map augmented with a hidden Markov model (HMM). We show experimentally that ARMO outperforms decoupled planning in terms of computation time and time needed for task completion. [439] Zlatan Dragisic. 2011. Semantic Matching for Stream Reasoning. Student Thesis. 110 pages. ISRN: LIU-IDA/LITH-EX-A--11/041--SE. Autonomous system needs to do a great deal of reasoning during execution in order to provide timely reactions to changes in their environment. Data needed for this reasoning process is often provided through a number of sensors. One approach for this kind of reasoning is evaluation of temporal logical formulas through progression. To evaluate these formulas it is necessary to provide relevant data for each symbol in a formula. Mapping relevant data to symbols in a formula could be done manually, however as systems become more complex it is harder for a designer to explicitly state and maintain thismapping. Therefore, automatic support for mapping data from sensors to symbols would make system more flexible and easier to maintain.DyKnow is a knowledge processing middleware which provides the support for processing data on different levels of abstractions. The output from the processing components in DyKnow is in the form of streams of information. In the case of DyKnow, reasoning over incrementally available data is done by progressing metric temporal logical formulas. A logical formula contains a number of symbols whose values over time must be collected and synchronized in order to determine the truth value of the formula. Mapping symbols in formula to relevant streams is done manually in DyKnow. The purpose of this matching is for each variable to find one or more streams whose content matches the intended meaning of the variable.This thesis analyses and provides a solution to the process of semantic matching. The analysis is mostly focused on how the existing semantic technologies such as ontologies can be used in this process. The thesis also analyses how this process can be used for matching symbols in a formula to content of streams on distributed and heterogeneous platforms. Finally, the thesis presents an implementation in the Robot Operating System (ROS). The implementation is tested in two case studies which cover a scenario where there is only a single platform in a system and a scenario where there are multiple distributed heterogeneous platforms in a system.The conclusions are that the semantic matching represents an important step towards fully automatized semantic-based stream reasoning. Our solution also shows that semantic technologies are suitable for establishing machine-readable domain models. The use of these technologies made the semantic matching domain and platform independent as all domain and platform specific knowledge is specified in ontologies. Moreover, semantic technologies provide support for integration of data from heterogeneous sources which makes it possible for platforms to use streams from distributed sources. [438] Mark Buller, Paul Cuddihy, Ernest Davis, Patrick Doherty, Finale Doshi-Velez, Esra Erdem, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Green, Knut Hinkelmann, James McLurkin, Mary Lou Maher, Rajiv Maheswaran, Sara Rubinelli, Nathan Schurr, Donia Scott, Dylan Shell, Pedro Szekely, Barbara Thoenssen and Arnold B Urken. 2011. Reports of the AAAI 2011 Spring Symposia. The AI Magazine, 32(3):119–127. AAAI Press. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2011 Spring Symposium Series Monday through Wednesday, March 21-23, 2011, at Stanford University. This report summarizes the eight symposia. [437] Piotr Rudol. 2011. Increasing Autonomy of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Through the Use of Imaging Sensors. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1510. Linköping University Electronic Press. 96 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7393-034-5. The range of missions performed by Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) has been steadily growing in the past decades thanks to continued development in several disciplines. The goal of increasing the autonomy of UAS's is widening the range of tasks which can be carried out without, or with minimal, external help. This thesis presents methods for increasing specific aspects of autonomy of UAS's operating both in outdoor and indoor environments where cameras are used as the primary sensors.First, a method for fusing color and thermal images for object detection, geolocation and tracking for UAS's operating primarily outdoors is presented. Specifically, a method for building saliency maps where human body locations are marked as points of interest is described. Such maps can be used in emergency situations to increase the situational awareness of first responders or a robotic system itself. Additionally, the same method is applied to the problem of vehicle tracking. A generated stream of geographical locations of tracked vehicles increases situational awareness by allowing for qualitative reasoning about, for example, vehicles overtaking, entering or leaving crossings.Second, two approaches to the UAS indoor localization problem in the absence of GPS-based positioning are presented. Both use cameras as the main sensors and enable autonomous indoor ight and navigation. The first approach takes advantage of cooperation with a ground robot to provide a UAS with its localization information. The second approach uses marker-based visual pose estimation where all computations are done onboard a small-scale aircraft which additionally increases its autonomy by not relying on external computational power. [436] Mariusz Wzorek. 2011. Selected Aspects of Navigation and Path Planning in Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1509. Linköping University Electronic Press. 107 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7393-037-6. Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are an important future technology with early generations already being used in many areas of application encompassing both military and civilian domains. This thesis proposes a number of integration techniques for combining control-based navigation with more abstract path planning functionality for UASs. These techniques are empirically tested and validated using an RMAX helicopter platform used in the UASTechLab at Linköping University. Although the thesis focuses on helicopter platforms, the techniques are generic in nature and can be used in other robotic systems.At the control level a navigation task is executed by a set of control modes. A framework based on the abstraction of hierarchical concurrent state machines for the design and development of hybrid control systems is presented. The framework is used to specify reactive behaviors and for sequentialisation of control modes. Selected examples of control systems deployed on UASs are presented. Collision-free paths executed at the control level are generated by path planning algorithms.We propose a path replanning framework extending the existing path planners to allow dynamic repair of flight paths when new obstacles or no-fly zones obstructing the current flight path are detected. Additionally, a novel approach to selecting the best path repair strategy based on machine learning technique is presented. A prerequisite for a safe navigation in a real-world environment is an accurate geometrical model. As a step towards building accurate 3D models onboard UASs initial work on the integration of a laser range finder with a helicopter platform is also presented.Combination of the techniques presented provides another step towards building comprehensive and robust navigation systems for future UASs. [435] David Landén. 2011. Complex Task Allocation for Delegation: From Theory to Practice. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1506. Linköping University Electronic Press. 139 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7393-048-2. The problem of determining who should do what given a set of tasks and a set of agents is called the task allocation problem. The problem occurs in many multi-agent system applications where a workload of tasks should be shared by a number of agents. In our case, the task allocation problem occurs as an integral part of a larger problem of determining if a task can be delegated from one agent to another.Delegation is the act of handing over the responsibility for something to someone. Previously, a theory for delegation including a delegation speech act has been specified. The speech act specifies the preconditions that must be fulfilled before the delegation can be carried out, and the postconditions that will be true afterward. To actually use the speech act in a multi-agent system, there must be a practical way of determining if the preconditions are true. This can be done by a process that includes solving a complex task allocation problem by the agents involved in the delegation.In this thesis a constraint-based task specification formalism, a complex task allocation algorithm for allocating tasks to unmanned aerial vehicles and a generic collaborative system shell for robotic systems are developed. The three components are used as the basis for a collaborative unmanned aircraft system that uses delegation for distributing and coordinating the agents' execution of complex tasks. [434] Marjan Alirezaie. 2011. Semantic Analysis Of Multi Meaning Words Using Machine Learning And Knowledge Representation. Student Thesis. 74 pages. ISRN: LiU/IDA-EX-A- -11/011- -SE. The present thesis addresses machine learning in a domain of naturallanguage phrases that are names of universities. It describes two approaches to this problem and a software implementation that has made it possible to evaluate them and to compare them.In general terms, the system's task is to learn to 'understand' the significance of the various components of a university name, such as the city or region where the university is located, the scienti c disciplines that are studied there, or the name of a famous person which may be part of the university name. A concrete test for whether the system has acquired this understanding is when it is able to compose a plausible university name given some components that should occur in the name.In order to achieve this capability, our system learns the structure of available names of some universities in a given data set, i.e. it acquires a grammar for the microlanguage of university names. One of the challenges is that the system may encounter ambiguities due to multi meaning words. This problem is addressed using a small ontology that is created during the training phase.Both domain knowledge and grammatical knowledge is represented using decision trees, which is an ecient method for concept learning. Besides for inductive inference, their role is to partition the data set into a hierarchical structure which is used for resolving ambiguities.The present report also de nes some modi cations in the de nitions of parameters, for example a parameter for entropy, which enable the system to deal with cognitive uncertainties. Our method for automatic syntax acquisition, ADIOS, is an unsupervised learning method. This method is described and discussed here, including a report on the outcome of the tests using our data set.The software that has been implemented and used in this project has been implemented in C. [433] Håkan Warnquist. 2011. Computer-Assisted Troubleshooting for Efficient Off-board Diagnosis. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1490. Linköping University Electronic Press. 169 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7393-151-9. This licentiate thesis considers computer-assisted troubleshooting of complex products such as heavy trucks. The troubleshooting task is to find and repair all faulty components in a malfunctioning system. This is done by performing actions to gather more information regarding which faults there can be or to repair components that are suspected to be faulty. The expected cost of the performed actions should be as low as possible.The work described in this thesis contributes to solving the troubleshooting task in such a way that a good trade-off between computation time and solution quality can be made. A framework for troubleshooting is developed where the system is diagnosed using non-stationary dynamic Bayesian networks and the decisions of which actions to perform are made using a new planning algorithm for Stochastic Shortest Path Problems called Iterative Bounding LAO*.It is shown how the troubleshooting problem can be converted into a Stochastic Shortest Path problem so that it can be efficiently solved using general algorithms such as Iterative Bounding LAO*. New and improved search heuristics for solving the troubleshooting problem by searching are also presented in this thesis.The methods presented in this thesis are evaluated in a case study of an auxiliary hydraulic braking system of a modern truck. The evaluation shows that the new algorithm Iterative Bounding LAO* creates troubleshooting plans with a lower expected cost faster than existing state-of-the-art algorithms in the literature. The case study shows that the troubleshooting framework can be applied to systems from the heavy vehicles domain. [432] Per-Magnus Olsson. 2011. Positioning Algorithms for Surveillance Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1476. Linköping University Electronic Press. 140 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7393-200-4. Surveillance is an important application for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The sensed information often has high priority and it must be made available to human operators as quickly as possible. Due to obstacles and limited communication range, it is not always possible to transmit the information directly to the base station. In this case, other UAVs can form a relay chain between the surveillance UAV and the base station. Determining suitable positions for such UAVs is a complex optimization problem in and of itself, and is made even more diﬃcult by communication and surveillance constraints.To solve diﬀerent variations of ﬁnding positions for UAVs for surveillance of one target, two new algorithms have been developed. One of the algorithms is developed especially for ﬁnding a set of relay chains oﬀering diﬀerent trade-oﬀs between the number of UAVsand the quality of the chain. The other algorithm is tailored towards ﬁnding the highest quality chain possible, given a limited number of available UAVs.Finding the optimal positions for surveillance of several targets is more diﬃcult. A study has been performed, in order to determine how the problems of interest can besolved. It turns out that very few of the existing algorithms can be used due to the characteristics of our speciﬁc problem. For this reason, an algorithm for quickly calculating positions for surveillance of multiple targets has been developed. This enables calculation of an initial chain that is immediately made available to the user, and the chain is then incrementally optimized according to the user’s desire. [431] Erik Sandewall. 2011. From systems to logic in the early development of nonmonotonic reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 175(1):416–427. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2010.04.013. This note describes how the notion of nonmonotonic reasoning emerged in Artificial Intelligence from the mid-1960s to 1980. It gives particular attention to the interplay between three kinds of activities: design of high-level programming systems for AI, design of truth-maintenance systems, and the development of nonmonotonic logics. This was not merely a development from logic to implementation: in several cases there was a development from a system design to a corresponding logic. The article concludes with some reflections on the roles and relationships between logicist theory and system design in AI, and in particular in Knowledge Representation. 2010 [430] Erik Sandewall. 2010. Exercising Moral Copyright for Evolving Publications. ScieCom Info, 6(3):??–??. Svenskt Resurscentrum för Vetenskaplig Kommunikation. Link: http://www.sciecom.org/ojs/index.php/sci... [429] Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Anh Linh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2010. Graded Beliefs, Goals and Intentions. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Logical Aspects of Multi-Agent Systems (LAMAS), pages 1–15. AAAI Press. [428] Cyrille Berger and Simon Lacroix. 2010. DSeg: Détection directe de segments dans une image. In 17ème congrès francophone AFRIF-AFIA Reconnaissance des Formes et Intelligence Artificielle (RFIA). Cet article présente une approche model-driven'' pour détecter des segmentsde droite dans une image. L'approche détecte les segments de manièreincrémentale sur la base du gradient de l'image, en exploitant un filtre deKalman linéaire qui estime les paramètres de la droite support des segments etles variances associées. Les algorithmes sont rapides et robustes au bruit etaux variations d'illumination de la scène perçue, ils permettent de détecterdes segments plus longs que les approches existantes guidées par les données(data-driven''), et ils ne nécessitent pas de délicate détermination deparamètres. Des résultats avec différentes conditions d'éclairage et descomparaisons avec les approches existantes sont présentés. [427] Prasanna Velagapudi, Alexander Kleiner, Nathan Brooks, Paul Scerri, Michael Lewis and Katia Sycara. 2010. RoboCupRescue - Virtual Robots Team STEEL (USA). In RoboCup 2010 (CDROM Proceedings), Team Description Paper, Rescue Simulation League. This paper describes the software system supporting the Carnegie Mellon/Univ. of Pittsburgh team of simulated search and rescue robots in the Robocup Rescue 2010 Virtual Robots competition. Building on the Machinetta agent software, robot command and control is decomposed into a hierarchy of subtasks managed by independent agents both on the robot and co-located with human operators. By encapsulating all robot and human operator interactions into interfaces to these agents, the system can perform with a high level of robustness and re-usability. As in previous years, the entire code base is portable and platform-independent, running entirely in Java. [426] Christian Dornhege, Johannes Bendler, Roxana Bersan, Philipp Blohm, Martin Gloderer, Andreas Hertle, Thomas Liebetraut, Diego Cerdan Puyol, Alexander Kleiner and Bernhard Nebel. 2010. RoboCupRescue 2010 - Robot League Team RescueRobots Freiburg (Germany). In RoboCup 2010 (CDROM Proceedings), Team Description Paper, Rescue Robot League. This paper describes the software and hardware system developed by the University of Freiburg team of search and rescue robots for the RoboCup Res- cue 2010 competition. This system is an extension to the software that finished in first place the 2005 and 2006 autonomy challenge, focusing on two key areas: autonomous navigation and manipulation. Our team, consisting mainly of students, originates from the former CS Freiburg team (RoboCupSoccer), the ResQ Freiburg team (RoboCupRescue Simulation), and RescueRobots Freiburg teams â€™05 and â€™06. [425] Wei Mou and Alexander Kleiner. 2010. Online Learning Terrain Classification for Adaptive Velocity Control. In In Proc. of the IEEE Int. Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), pages 1–7. DOI: 10.1109/SSRR.2010.5981563. Safe teleoperation during critical missions, such as urban search and rescue and bomb disposal, requires careful velocity control when different types of terrain are found in the scenario. This can particularly be challenging when mission time is limited and the operator’s field of view affected. This paper presents a method for online adapting robot velocities according to the terrain classification from vision and laser readings. The classifier adapts itself to illumination variations, and can be improved online given feedback from the operator. [424] Sören Schwertfeger, Adam Jacoff, Chris Scrapper, Johannes Pellenz and Alexander Kleiner. 2010. Evaluation of Maps using Fixed Shapes: The Fiducial Map Metric. In Proc. of the Int. Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS), pages 344–351. NIST. Mapping is an important task for mobile robots. Assessing the quality of those maps is an open topic. A new approach on map evaluation is presented here. It makes use of artificial objects placed in the environment named \"Fiducials\". Using the known ground-truth positions and the positions of the fiducials identified in the map, a number of quality attributes can be assigned to that map. Depending on the application domain those attributes are weighed to compute a final score. During the 2010 NIST Response Robot Evaluation Exercise at Disaster City an area was populated with fiducials and different mapping runs were performed. The maps generated there are assessed in this paper demonstrating the Fiducial approach. Finally this map scoring algorithm is compared to other approaches found in literature. [423] A. Kolling, Alexander Kleiner, M. Lewis and K. Sycara. 2010. Solving Pursuit-Evasion Problems on Height Maps. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010) Workshop: Search and Pursuit/Evasion in the Physical World: Efficiency, Scalability, and Guarantees. IEEE. In this paper we present an approach for a pursuit-evasion problem that considers a 2.5d environment represented by a height map. Such a representation is particularly suitable for large-scale outdoor pursuit-evasion. By allowing height information we not only capture some aspects of 3d visibility but can also consider target heights. In our approach we construct a graph representation of the environment by sampling points and their detection sets which extend the usual notion of visibility. Once a graph is constructed we compute strategies on this graph using a modification of previous work on graph-searching. This strategy is converted into robot paths that are planned on the height map by classifying the terrain appropriately. In experiments we investigate the performance of our approach and provide examples including a map of a small village with surrounding hills and a sample map with multiple loops and elevation plateaus. Experiments are carried out with varying sensing ranges as well as target and sensor heights. To the best of our knowledge the presented approach is the first viable solution to 2.5d pursuit-evasion with height maps. [422] D. Maier and Alexander Kleiner. 2010. Improved GPS Sensor Model for Mobile Robots in Urban Terrain. In IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 4385–4390. IEEE. ISBN: 978-1-4244-5038-1. DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.2010.5509895. Autonomous robot navigation in outdoor scenarios gains increasing importance in various growing application areas. Whereas in non-urban domains such as deserts the problem of successful GPS-based navigation appears to be almost solved, navigation in urban domains particularly in the close vicinity of buildings is still a challenging problem. In such situations GPS accuracy significantly drops down due to multiple signal reflections with larger objects causing the so-called multipath error. In this paper we contribute a novel approach for incorporating multi- path errors into the conventional GPS sensor model by analyzing environmental structures from online generated point clouds. The approach has been validated by experimental results conducted with an all- terrain robot operating in scenarios requiring close- to-building navigation. Presented results show that positioning accuracy can significantly be improved within urban domains. [421] A. Kolling, Alexander Kleiner, M. Lewis and K. Sycara. 2010. Pursuit-Evasion in 2.5d based on Team-Visibility. In IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 4610–4616. IEEE. ISBN: 978-1-4244-6674-0. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2010.5649270. In this paper we present an approach for a pursuit-evasion problem that considers a 2.5d environment represented by a height map. Such a representation is particularly suitable for large-scale outdoor pursuit-evasion, captures some aspects of 3d visibility and can include target heights. In our approach we construct a graph representation of the environment by sampling points and computing detection sets, an extended notion of visibility. Moreover, the constructed graph captures overlaps of detection sets allowing for a coordinated team-based clearing of the environment with robots that move to the sampled points. Once a graph is constructed we compute strategies on it utilizing previous work on graph-searching. This is converted into robot paths that are planned on the height map by classifying the terrain appropriately. In experiments we investigate the performance of our approach and provide examples including a sample map with multiple loops and elevation plateaus and two realistic maps, one of a village and one of a mountain range. To the best of our knowledge the presented approach is the first viable solution to 2.5d pursuit-evasion with height maps. [420] D. Sun, Alexander Kleiner and C. Schindelhauer. 2010. Decentralized Hash Tables For Mobile Robot Teams Solving Intra-Logistics Tasks. In 9th Int. Joint Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), pages 923–930. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and. Although a remarkably high degree of automation has been reached in production and intra-logistics nowadays, human labor is still used for transportation using handcarts and forklifts. High labor cost and risk of injury are the undesirable consequences. Alternative approaches in automated warehouses are fixed installed conveyors installed either overhead or floor-based. The drawback of such solutions is the lack of flexibility, which is necessary when the production lines of the company change. Then, such an installation has to be re-built. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of decentralized teams of autonomous robots performing intra-logistics tasks using distributed algorithms. Centralized solutions suffer from limited scalability and have a single point of failure. The task is to transport material between stations keeping the communication network structure intact and most importantly, to facilitate a fair distribution of robots among loading stations. Our approach is motivated by strategies from peer-to-peer-networks and mobile ad-hoc networks. In particular we use an adapted version of distributed heterogeneous hash tables (DHHT) for distributing the tasks and localized communication. Experimental results presented in this paper show that our method reaches a fair distribution of robots over loading stations. [419] Anh Linh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2010. Three-Valued Paraconsistent Reasoning for Semantic Web Agents. In Proceedings of the 4th International KES Symposium on Agents and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA), pages 152–162. In series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #6070. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-642-13479-1. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-13480-7_17. Description logics [1] refer to a family of formalisms concentrated around concepts, roles and individuals. They are used in many multiagent and semantic web applications as a foundation for specifying knowledge bases and reasoning about them. One of widely applied description logics is SHIQ [7,8]. In the current paper we address the problem of inconsistent knowledge. Inconsistencies may naturally appear in the considered application domains, for example as a result of fusing knowledge from distributed sources. We define three three-valued paraconsistent semantics for SHIQ, reflecting different meanings of concept inclusion of practical importance. We also provide a quite general syntactic condition of safeness guaranteeing satisfiability of a knowledge base w.r.t. three-valued semantics and define a faithful translation of our formalism into a suitable version of a two-valued description logic. Such a translation allows one to use existing tools and SHIQ reasoners to deal with inconsistent knowledge. [418] Anh Linh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2010. Tableaux with Global Caching for Checking Satisfiability of a Knowledge Base in the Description Logic SH. Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence, ??(1):21–38. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-642-15033-3. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-15034-0_2. Description logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation languages which can be used to represent the terminological knowledge of an application domain in a structured and formally well-understood way. DLs can be used, for example, for conceptual modeling or as ontology languages. In fact, OWL (Web Ontology Language), recommended by W3C, is based on description logics. In the current paper we give the first direct ExpTime (optimal) tableau decision procedure, which is not based on transformation or on the pre-completion technique, for checking satisfiability of a knowledge base in the description logic SH. Our procedure uses sound global caching and can be implemented as an extension of the highly optimized tableau prover TGC to obtain an efficient program for the mentioned satisfiability problem. [417] Erik Sandewall. 2010. Defeasible inheritance with doubt index and its axiomatic characterization. Artificial Intelligence, 174(18):1431–1459. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2010.09.001. This article introduces and uses a representation of defeasible inheritance networks where links in the network are viewed as propositions, and where defeasible links are tagged with a quantitative indication of the proportion of exceptions, called the doubt index. This doubt index is used for restricting the length of the chains of inference. The representation also introduces the use of defeater literals that disable the chaining of subsumption links. The use of defeater literals replaces the use of negative defeasible inheritance links, expressing \"most A are not B\". The new representation improves the expressivity significantly. Inference in inheritance networks is defined by a combination of axioms that constrain the contents of network extensions, a heuristic restriction that also has that effect, and a nonmonotonic operation of minimizing the set of defeater literals while retaining consistency. We introduce an underlying semantics that defines the meaning of literals in a network, and prove that the axioms are sound with respect to this semantics. We also discuss the conditions for obtaining completeness. Traditional concepts, assumptions and issues in research on nonmonotonic or defeasible inheritance are reviewed in the perspective of this approach. [416] Linh Anh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2010. Checking Consistency of an ABox w.r.t. Global Assumptions in PDL. Fundamenta Informaticae, 102(1):97–113. IOS Press. DOI: 10.3233/FI-2010-299. We reformulate Pratts tableau decision procedure of checking satisfiability of a set of formulas in PDL. Our formulation is simpler and its implementation is more direct. Extending the method we give the first Ex PT m E (optimal) tableau decision procedure not based on transformation for checking consistency of an ABox w.r.t. a TBox in PDL (here, PDL is treated as a description logic). We also prove a new result that the data complexity of the instance checking problem in PDL is coNP-complete. [415] Patrick Doherty, Jonas Kvarnström, Fredrik Heintz, David Landén and Per-Magnus Olsson. 2010. Research with Collaborative Unmanned Aircraft Systems. In Gerhard Lakemeyer, Hector J. Levesque, Fiora Pirri, editors, Proceedings of the Dagstuhl Workshop on Cognitive Robotics. In series: Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings #10081. Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik. We provide an overview of ongoing research which targets development of a principled framework for mixed-initiative interaction with unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). UASs are now becoming technologically mature enough to be integrated into civil society. Principled interaction between UASs and human resources is an essential component in their future uses in complex emergency services or bluelight scenarios. In our current research, we have targeted a triad of fundamental, interdependent conceptual issues: delegation, mixed- initiative interaction and adjustable autonomy, that is being used as a basis for developing a principled and well-defined framework for interaction. This can be used to clarify, validate and verify different types of interaction between human operators and UAS systems both theoretically and practically in UAS experimentation with our deployed platforms. [414] Oleg Burdakov, Patrick Doherty, Kaj Holmberg and Per-Magnus Olsson. 2010. Optimal placement of UV-based communications relay nodes. Journal of Global Optimization, 48(4):511–531. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s10898-010-9526-8. Note: The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com:Oleg Burdakov, Patrick Doherty, Kaj Holmberg and Per-Magnus Olsson, Optimal placement of UV-based communications relay nodes, 2010, Journal of Global Optimization, (48), 4, 511-531.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10898-010-9526-8Copyright: Springer Science Business Mediahttp://www.springerlink.com/ We consider a constrained optimization problem with mixed integer and real variables. It models optimal placement of communications relay nodes in the presence of obstacles. This problem is widely encountered, for instance, in robotics, where it is required to survey some target located in one point and convey the gathered information back to a base station located in another point. One or more unmanned aerial or ground vehicles (UAVs or UGVs) can be used for this purpose as communications relays. The decision variables are the number of unmanned vehicles (UVs) and the UV positions. The objective function is assumed to access the placement quality. We suggest one instance of such a function which is more suitable for accessing UAV placement. The constraints are determined by, firstly, a free line of sight requirement for every consecutive pair in the chain and, secondly, a limited communication range. Because of these requirements, our constrained optimization problem is a difficult multi-extremal problem for any fixed number of UVs. Moreover, the feasible set of real variables is typically disjoint. We present an approach that allows us to efficiently find a practically acceptable approximation to a global minimum in the problem of optimal placement of communications relay nodes. It is based on a spatial discretization with a subsequent reduction to a shortest path problem. The case of a restricted number of available UVs is also considered here. We introduce two label correcting algorithms which are able to take advantage of using some peculiarities of the resulting restricted shortest path problem. The algorithms produce a Pareto solution to the two-objective problem of minimizing the path cost and the number of hops. We justify their correctness. The presented results of numerical 3D experiments show that our algorithms are superior to the conventional Bellman-Ford algorithm tailored to solving this problem. [413] Piotr Rudol, Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Vision-based Pose Estimation for Autonomous Indoor Navigation of Micro-scale Unmanned Aircraft Systems. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 1913–1920. In series: Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation #2010. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-5038-1. DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.2010.5509203. We present a navigation system for autonomous indoor flight of micro-scale Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) which is based on a method for accurate monocular vision pose estimation. The method makes use of low cost artificial landmarks placed in the environment and allows for fully autonomous flight with all computation done on-board a UAS on COTS hardware. We provide a detailed description of all system components along with an accuracy evaluation and a time profiling result for the pose estimation method. Additionally, we show how the system is integrated with an existing micro-scale UAS and provide results of experimental autonomous flight tests. To our knowledge, this system is one of the first to allow for complete closed-loop control and goal-driven navigation of a micro-scale UAS in an indoor setting without requiring connection to any external entities. [412] Mariusz Wzorek, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Choosing Path Replanning Strategies for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. In Ronen Brafman, Héctor Geffner, Jörg Hoffmann, Henry Kautz, editors, Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), pages 193–200. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-449-9. Unmanned aircraft systems use a variety of techniques to plan collision-free flight paths given a map of obstacles and no- fly zones. However, maps are not perfect and obstacles may change over time or be detected during flight, which may in- validate paths that the aircraft is already following. Thus, dynamic in-flight replanning is required.Numerous strategies can be used for replanning, where the time requirements and the plan quality associated with each strategy depend on the environment around the original flight path. In this paper, we investigate the use of machine learn- ing techniques, in particular support vector machines, to choose the best possible replanning strategy depending on the amount of time available. The system has been implemented, integrated and tested in hardware-in-the-loop simulation with a Yamaha RMAX helicopter platform. [411] Fredrik Heintz, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Stream-Based Reasoning in DyKnow. In Gerhard Lakemeyer and Hector J. Levesque and Fiora Pirri, editors, Proceedings of the Dagstuhl Workshop on Cognitive Robotics. In series: Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings #10081. Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik. The information available to modern autonomous systems is often in the form of streams. As the number of sensors and other stream sources increases there is a growing need for incremental reasoning about the incomplete content of sets of streams in order to draw relevant conclusions and react to new situations as quickly as possible. To act rationally, autonomous agents often depend on high level reasoning components that require crisp, symbolic knowledge about the environment. Extensive processing at many levels of abstraction is required to generate such knowledge from noisy, incomplete and quantitative sensor data. We define knowledge processing middleware as a systematic approach to integrating and organizing such processing, and argue that connecting processing components with streams provides essential support for steady and timely flows of information. DyKnow is a concrete and implemented instantiation of such middleware, providing support for stream reasoning at several levels. First, the formal kpl language allows the specification of streams connecting knowledge processes and the required properties of such streams. Second, chronicle recognition incrementally detects complex events from streams of more primitive events. Third, complex metric temporal formulas can be incrementally evaluated over streams of states. DyKnow and the stream reasoning techniques are described and motivated in the context of a UAV traffic monitoring application. [410] Fredrik Heintz, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Stream-Based Middleware Support for Embedded Reasoning. In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Embedded Reasoning: Intelligence in Embedded Systems (ER). For autonomous systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles to successfully perform complex missions, a great deal of embedded reasoning is required at varying levels of abstraction. In order to make use of diverse reasoning modules in such systems, issues of integration such as sensor data flow and information flow between such modules has to be taken into account. The DyKnow framework is a tool with a formal basis that pragmatically deals with many of the architectural issues which arise in such systems. This includes a systematic stream-based method for handling the sense-reasoning gap, caused by the wide difference in abstraction levels between the noisy data generally available from sensors and the symbolic, semantically meaningful information required by many high-level reasoning modules. DyKnow has proven to be quite robust and widely applicable to different aspects of hybrid software architectures for robotics.In this paper, we describe the DyKnow framework and show how it is integrated and used in unmanned aerial vehicle systems developed in our group. In particular, we focus on issues pertaining to the sense-reasoning gap and the symbol grounding problem and the use of DyKnow as a means of generating semantic structures representing situational awareness for such systems. We also discuss the use of DyKnow in the context of automated planning, in particular execution monitoring. [409] Mattias Krysander, Fredrik Heintz, Jacob Roll and Erik Frisk. 2010. FlexDx: A Reconfigurable Diagnosis Framework. Engineering applications of artificial intelligence, 23(8):1303–1313. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.engappai.2010.01.004. Detecting and isolating multiple faults is a computationally expensive task. It typically consists of computing a set of tests and then computing the diagnoses based on the test results. This paper describes FlexDx, a reconfigurable diagnosis framework which reduces the computational burden while retaining the isolation performance by only running a subset of all tests that is sufficient to find new conflicts. Tests in FlexDx are thresholded residuals used to indicate conflicts in the monitored system. Special attention is given to the issues introduced by a reconfigurable diagnosis framework. For example, tests are added and removed dynamically, tests are partially performed on historic data, and synchronous and asynchronous processing are combined. To handle these issues FlexDx has been implemented using DyKnow, a stream-based knowledge processing middleware framework. Concrete methods for each component in the FlexDx framework are presented. The complete approach is exemplified on a dynamic system which clearly illustrates the complexity of the problem and the computational gain of the proposed approach. [408] Fredrik Heintz, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Stream-Based Reasoning Support for Autonomous Systems. In Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI). In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #215. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-60750-605-8. DOI: 10.3233/978-1-60750-606-5-183. For autonomous systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles to successfully perform complex missions, a great deal of embedded reasoning is required at varying levels of abstraction. To support the integration and use of diverse reasoning modules we have developed DyKnow, a stream-based knowledge processing middleware framework. By using streams, DyKnow captures the incremental nature of sensor data and supports the continuous reasoning necessary to react to rapid changes in the environment. DyKnow has a formal basis and pragmatically deals with many of the architectural issues which arise in autonomous systems. This includes a systematic stream-based method for handling the sense-reasoning gap, caused by the wide difference in abstraction levels between the noisy data generally available from sensors and the symbolic, semantically meaningful information required by many highlevel reasoning modules. As concrete examples, stream-based support for anchoring and planning are presented. [407] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Federated DyKnow, a Distributed Information Fusion System for Collaborative UAVs. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), pages 1063–1069. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-7814-9. DOI: 10.1109/ICARCV.2010.5707967. As unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications are becoming more complex and covering larger physical areas there is an increasing need for multiple UAVs to cooperatively solve problems. To produce more complete and accurate information about the environment we present the DyKnow Federation framework for distributed fusion among collaborative UAVs. A federation is created and maintained using a multi-agent delegation framework which allows high-level specification and reasoning about resource bounded cooperative problem solving. When the federation is set up, local information is transparently shared between the agents according to specification. The work is presented in the context of a multi-UAV traffic monitoring scenario. [406] Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Automated Planning for Collaborative UAV Systems. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), pages 1078–1085. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-7813-2, 978-1-4244-7814-9. DOI: 10.1109/ICARCV.2010.5707969. IEEE Explore: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.... Mission planning for collaborative Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS:s) is a complex topic which involves trade-offs between the degree of centralization or decentralization required, the degree of abstraction in which plans are generated, and the degree to which such plans are distributed among participating UAS:s. In realistic environments such as those found in naturaland man-made catastrophes where emergency services personnelare involved, a certain degree of centralization and abstractionis necessary in order for those in charge to understand andeventually sign off on potential plans. It is also quite often thecase that unconstrained distribution of actions is inconsistentwith the loosely coupled interactions and dependencies whicharise between collaborating systems. In this article, we presenta new planning algorithm for collaborative UAS:s based oncombining ideas from forward chaining planning with partialorderplanning leading to a new hybrid partial order forwardchaining(POFC) framework which meets the requirements oncentralization, abstraction and distribution we find in realisticemergency services settings. [405] Per-Magnus Olsson, Jonas Kvarnström, Patrick Doherty, Oleg Burdakov and Kaj Holmberg. 2010. Generating UAV Communication Networks for Monitoring and Surveillance. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV 2010), pages 1070–1077. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-7814-9. DOI: 10.1109/ICARCV.2010.5707968. An important use of unmanned aerial vehicles is surveillance of distant targets, where sensor information must quickly be transmitted back to a base station. In many cases, high uninterrupted bandwidth requires line-of-sight between sender and transmitter to minimize quality degradation. Communication range is typically limited, especially when smaller UAVs are used. Both problems can be solved by creating relay chains for surveillance of a single target, and relay trees for simultaneous surveillance of multiple targets. In this paper, we show how such chains and trees can be calculated. For relay chains we create a set of chains offering different trade-offs between the number of UAVs in the chain and the chain’s cost. We also show new results on how relay trees can be quickly calculated and then incrementally improved if necessary. Encouraging empirical results for improvement of relay trees are presented. [404] Håkan Warnquist, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Iterative Bounding LAO*. In Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), pages 341–346. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #215. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-60750-605-8, 978-1-60750-606-5. DOI: 10.3233/978-1-60750-606-5-341. Iterative Bounding LAO* is a new algorithm for epsilon- optimal probabilistic planning problems where an absorbing goal state should be reached at a minimum expected cost from a given initial state. The algorithm is based on the LAO* algorithm for finding optimal solutions in cyclic AND/OR graphs. The new algorithm uses two heuristics, one upper bound and one lower bound of the optimal cost. The search is guided by the lower bound as in LAO*, while the upper bound is used to prune search branches. The algorithm has a new mechanism for expanding search nodes, and while maintaining the error bounds, it may use weighted heuristics to reduce the size of the explored search space. In empirical tests on benchmark problems, Iterative Bounding LAO* expands fewer search nodes compared to state of the art RTDP variants that also use two-sided bounds. [403] Jonas Kvarnström. 2010. Planning for Loosely Coupled Agents using Partial Order Forward-Chaining. In Roland Bol, editor, The Swedish AI Society Workshop 2010, SAIS 2010, pages 45–54. In series: Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings #48. Linköping University Electronic Press, Linköpings universitet. Fulltext: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/048/009/ecp1048... Partially ordered plan structures are highly suitable for centralized multi-agent planning, where plans should be minimally constrained in terms of precedence between actions performed by different agents. In many cases, however, any given agent will perform its own actions in strict sequence. We take advantage of this fact to develop a hybrid of temporal partial order planning and forward-chaining planning. A sequence of actions is constructed for each agent and linked to other agents' actions by a partially ordered precedence relation as required. When agents are not too tightly coupled, this structure enables the generation of partial but strong information about the state at the end of each agent's action sequence. Such state information can be effectively exploited during search. A prototype planner within this framework has been implemented, using precondition control formulas to guide the search process. [402] Patrick Doherty and Andrzej Szalas. 2010. On the Correctness of Rough-Set Based Approximate Reasoning. In M. Szczuka, M. Kryszkiewicz, S. Ramanna, R. Jensen, Q. Hu, editors, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Rough Sets and Current Trends in Computing (RSCTC), pages 327–336. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #6086. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-642-13528-6. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-13529-3_35. There is a natural generalization of an indiscernibility relation used in rough set theory, where rather than partitioning the universe of discourse into indiscernibility classes, one can consider a covering of the universe by similarity-based neighborhoods with lower and upper approximations of relations defined via the neighborhoods. When taking this step, there is a need to tune approximate reasoning to the desired accuracy. We provide a framework for analyzing self-adaptive knowledge structures. We focus on studying the interaction between inputs and output concepts in approximate reasoning. The problems we address are: -given similarity relations modeling approximate concepts, what are similarity relations for the output concepts that guarantee correctness of reasoning? -assuming that output similarity relations lead to concepts which are not accurate enough, how can one tune input similarities? [401] Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Linh Anh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2010. A Framework for Graded Beliefs, Goals and Intentions. Fundamenta Informaticae, 100(1-4):53–76. IOS Press. DOI: 10.3233/FI-2010-263. In natural language we often use graded concepts, reflecting different intensity degrees of certain features. Whenever such concepts appear in a given real-life context, they need to be appropriately expressed in its models. In this paper, we provide a framework which allows for extending the BGI model of agency by grading beliefs, goals and intentions. We concentrate on TEAMLOG [6, 7, 8, 9, 12] and provide a complexity-optimal decision method for its graded version TEAMLOG(K) by translating it into CPDLreg (propositional dynamic logic with converse and \"inclusion axioms\" characterized by regular languages). We also develop a tableau calculus which leads to the first EXPTIME (optimal) tableau decision procedure for CPDLreg. As CPDLreg is suitable for expressing complex properties of graded operators, the procedure can also be used as a decision tool for other multiagent formalisms. [400] Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Linh Anh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2010. A Layered Rule-Based Architecture for Approximate Knowledge Fusion. COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS, 7(3):617–642. COMSIS CONSORTIUM. DOI: 10.2298/CSIS100209015D. In this paper we present a framework for fusing approximate knowledge obtained from various distributed, heterogenous knowledge sources. This issue is substantial in modeling multi-agent systems, where a group of loosely coupled heterogeneous agents cooperate in achieving a common goal. In paper [5] we have focused on defining general mechanism for knowledge fusion. Next, the techniques ensuring tractability of fusing knowledge expressed as a Horn subset of propositional dynamic logic were developed in [13,16]. Propositional logics may seem too weak to be useful in real-world applications. On the other hand, propositional languages may be viewed as sublanguages of first-order logics which serve as a natural tool to define concepts in the spirit of description logics [2]. These notions may be further used to define various ontologies, like e. g. those applicable in the Semantic Web. Taking this step, we propose a framework, in which our Horn subset of dynamic logic is combined with deductive database technology. This synthesis is formally implemented in the framework of HSPDL architecture. The resulting knowledge fusion rules are naturally applicable to real-world data. [399] Oleg Burdakov, Patrick Doherty, Kaj Holmberg, Jonas Kvarnström and Per-Magnus Olsson. 2010. Relay Positioning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Surveillance. The international journal of robotics research, 29(8):1069–1087. Sage Publications. DOI: 10.1177/0278364910369463. When unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used for surveillance, information must often be transmitted to a base station in real time. However, limited communication ranges and the common requirement of free line of sight may make direct transmissions from distant targets impossible. This problem can be solved using relay chains consisting of one or more intermediate relay UAVs. This leads to the problem of positioning such relays given known obstacles, while taking into account a possibly mission-specific quality measure. The maximum quality of a chain may depend strongly on the number of UAVs allocated. Therefore, it is desirable to either generate a chain of maximum quality given the available UAVs or allow a choice from a spectrum of Pareto-optimal chains corresponding to different trade-offs between the number of UAVs used and the resulting quality. In this article, we define several problem variations in a continuous three-dimensional setting. We show how sets of Pareto-optimal chains can be generated using graph search and present a new label-correcting algorithm generating such chains significantly more efficiently than the best-known algorithms in the literature. Finally, we present a new dual ascent algorithm with better performance for certain tasks and situations. [398] Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Linh Anh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2010. Tractable approximate knowledge fusion using the Horn fragment of serial propositional dynamic logic. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 51(3):346–362. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijar.2009.11.002. In this paper we investigate a technique for fusing approximate knowledge obtained from distributed, heterogeneous information sources. This issue is substantial, e.g., in modeling multiagent systems, where a group of loosely coupled heterogeneous agents cooperate in achieving a common goal. Information exchange, leading ultimately to knowledge fusion, is a natural and vital ingredient of this process. We use a generalization of rough sets and relations [30], which depends on allowing arbitrary similarity relations. The starting point of this research is [6], where a framework for knowledge fusion in multiagent systems is introduced. Agents individual perceptual capabilities are represented by similarity relations, further aggregated to express joint capabilities of teams, This aggregation, expressing a shift from individual to social level of agents activity, has been formalized by means of dynamic logic. The approach of Doherty et al. (2007) [6] uses the full propositional dynamic logic, which does not guarantee tractability of reasoning. Our idea is to adapt the techniques of Nguyen [26-28] to provide an engine for tractable approximate database querying restricted to a Horn fragment of serial dynamic logic. We also show that the obtained formalism is quite powerful in applications. [397] Karolina Eliasson. 2010. A case-based approach to dialogue systems. Journal of experimental and theoretical artificial intelligence (Print), 22(1):23–51. Taylor & Francis. DOI: 10.1080/09528130902723708. We describe an approach to integrate dialogue management, machine-learning and action planning in a system for dialogue between a human and a robot. Case-based techniques are used because they permit life-long learning from experience and demand little prior knowledge and few static hand-written structures. This approach has been developed through the work on an experimental dialogue system, called CEDERIC, that is connected to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). A single case base and case-based reasoning engine is used both for understanding and for planning actions by the UAV. Dialogue experiments both with experienced and novice users, where the users have solved tasks by dialogue with this system, showed very adequate success rates. [396] Fredrik Åslin. 2010. Evaluation of Hierarchical Temporal Memory in algorithmic trading. Student Thesis. 32 pages. ISRN: LIU-IDA/LITH-EX-G--10/005--SE. This thesis looks into how one could use Hierarchal Temporal Memory (HTM) networks to generate models that could be used as trading algorithms. The thesis begins with a brief introduction to algorithmic trading and commonly used concepts when developing trading algorithms. The thesis then proceeds to explain what an HTM is and how it works. To explore whether an HTM could be used to generate models that could be used as trading algorithms, the thesis conducts a series of experiments. The goal of the experiments is to iteratively optimize the settings for an HTM and try to generate a model that when used as a trading algorithm would have more profitable trades than losing trades. The setup of the experiments is to train an HTM to predict if it is a good time to buy some shares in a security and hold them for a fixed time before selling them again. A fair amount of the models generated during the experiments was profitable on data the model have never seen before, therefore the author concludes that it is possible to train an HTM so it can be used as a profitable trading algorithm. [395] Fredrik Heintz, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2010. Bridging the sense-reasoning gap: DyKnow - Stream-based middleware for knowledge processing. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 24(1):14–26. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.aei.2009.08.007. Engineering autonomous agents that display rational and goal-directed behavior in dynamic physical environments requires a steady flow of information from sensors to high-level reasoning components. However, while sensors tend to generate noisy and incomplete quantitative data, reasoning often requires crisp symbolic knowledge. The gap between sensing and reasoning is quite wide, and cannot in general be bridged in a single step. Instead, this task requires a more general approach to integrating and organizing multiple forms of information and knowledge processing on different levels of abstraction in a structured and principled manner. We propose knowledge processing middleware as a systematic approach to organizing such processing. Desirable properties are presented and motivated. We argue that a declarative stream-based system is appropriate for the required functionality and present DyKnow, a concrete implemented instantiation of stream-based knowledge processing middleware with a formal semantics. Several types of knowledge processes are defined and motivated in the context of a UAV traffic monitoring application. In the implemented application, DyKnow is used to incrementally bridge the sense-reasoning gap and generate partial logical models of the environment over which metric temporal logical formulas are evaluated. Using such formulas, hypotheses are formed and validated about the type of vehicles being observed. DyKnow is also used to generate event streams representing for example changes in qualitative spatial relations, which are used to detect traffic violations expressed as declarative chronicles. [394] Oleg Burdakov, Patrick Doherty, Kaj Holmberg, Jonas Kvarnström and Per-Magnus Olsson. 2010. Positioning Unmanned Aerial Vehicles As Communication Relays for Surveillance Tasks. In J. Trinkle, Y. Matsuoka and J.A. Castellanos, editors, Robotics: Science and Systems V, pages 257–264. MIT Press. ISBN: 978-0-262-51463-7. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/bib/12536749 Link to publication: http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss05... When unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used to survey distant targets, it is important to transmit sensor information back to a base station. As this communication often requires high uninterrupted bandwidth, the surveying UAV often needs afree line-of-sight to the base station, which can be problematic in urban or mountainous areas. Communication ranges may also belimited, especially for smaller UAVs. Though both problems can be solved through the use of relay chains consisting of one or more intermediate relay UAVs, this leads to a new problem: Where should relays be placed for optimum performance? We present two new algorithms capable of generating such relay chains, one being a dual ascent algorithm and the other a modification of the Bellman-Ford algorithm. As the priorities between the numberof hops in the relay chain and the cost of the chain may vary, wecalculate chains of different lengths and costs and let the ground operator choose between them. Several different formulations for edge costs are presented. In our test cases, both algorithms are substantially faster than an optimized version of the original Bellman-Ford algorithm, which is used for comparison. 2009 [393] Mikael Nilsson. 2009. Spanneröar och spannervägar. Student Thesis. 126 pages. ISRN: -. In this Master Thesis the possibility to efficiently divide a graph into spanner islands is examined. Spanner islands are islands of the graph that fulfill the spanner condition, that the distance between two nodes via the edges in the graph cannot be too far, regulated by the stretch constant, compared to the Euclidian distance between them. In the resulting division the least number of nodes connecting to other islands is sought-after. Different heuristics are evaluated with the conclusion that for dense graphs a heuristic using MAX-FLOW to divide problematic nodes gives the best result whereas for sparse graphs a heuristic using the single-link clustering method performs best. The problem of finding a spanner path, a path fulfilling the spanner condition, between two nodes is also investigated. The problem is proven to be NP-complete for a graph of size n if the spanner constant is greater than n^(1+1/k)*k^0.5 for some integer k. An algorithm with complexity O(2^(0.822n)) is given. A special type of graph where all the nodes are located on integer locations along the real line is investigated. An algorithm to solve this problem is presented with a complexity of O(2^((c*log n)^2))), where c is a constant depending only on the spanner constant. For instance, the complexity O(2^((5.32*log n)^2))) can be reached for stretch 1.5. [392] Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Linh Anh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2009. Fusing Approximate Knowledge from Distributed Sources. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC), pages 75–86. In series: Studies in Computational Intelligence #237. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. ISBN: 978-3-642-03213-4, 978-3-642-26930-1. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-03214-1_8. In this paper we investigate a technique for fusing approximate knowledge obtained from distributed, heterogeneous information sources. We use a generalization of rough sets and relations [14], which depends on allowing arbitrary similarity relations. The starting point of this research is [2], where a framework for knowledge fusion in multi-agent systems is introduced. Agent’s individual perceptual capabilities are represented by similarity relations, further aggregated to express joint capabilities of teams. This aggregation, allowing a shift from individual to social level, has been formalized by means of dynamic logic. The approach of [2] uses the full propositional dynamic logic, not guaranteeing the tractability of reasoning. Therefore the results of [11, 12, 13] are adapted to provide a technical engine for tractable approximate database querying restricted to a Horn fragment of serial PDL. We also show that the obtained formalism is quite powerful in applications. [391] Linh Anh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2009. Checking Consistency of an ABox w.r.t. Global Assumptions in PDL*. In Proceedings of the 18th Concurrency, Specification and Programming Workshop (CS&P), pages 431–442. [390] Linh Anh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2009. An Optimal Tableau Decision Procedure for Converse-PDL. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Knowlegde and Systems Engineering (KSE), pages 207–214. IEEE Computer Society. ISBN: 978-1-4244-5086-2. DOI: 10.1109/KSE.2009.12. We give a novel tableau calculus and an optimal (EXPTIME) tableau decision procedure based on the calculus for the satisfiability problem of propositional dynamic logic with converse. Our decision procedure is formulated with global caching and can be implemented together with useful optimization techniques. [389] Cyrille Berger. 2009. Perception de la géométrie de l'environment pour la navigation autonome. PhD Thesis. Université de Toulouse. 164 pages. Le but de la recherche en robotique mobile est de donner aux robots la capacité d'accomplir des missions dans un environnement qui n'est pas parfaitement connu. Mission, qui consiste en l'exécution d'un certain nombre d'actions élémentaires (déplacement, manipulation d'objets...) et qui nécessite une localisation précise, ainsi que la construction d'un bon modèle géométrique de l'environnement, a partir de l'exploitation de ses propres capteurs, des capteurs externes, de l'information provenant d'autres robots et de modèle existant, par exemple d'un système d'information géographique. L'information commune est la géométrie de l'environnement. La première partie du manuscrit couvre les différentes méthodes d'extraction de l'information géométrique. La seconde partie présente la création d'un modèle géométrique en utilisant un graphe, ainsi qu'une méthode pour extraire de l'information du graphe et permettre au robot de se localiser dans l'environnement. [388] Teresa Vidal-Calleja, Cyrille Berger, Joan Solà and Simon Lacroix. 2009. Environment Modeling for Cooperative Aerial/Ground Robotic Systems. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), pages 681–696. In series: Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics #70. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-642-19456-6. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-19457-3_40. This paper addresses the cooperative localization and visual mapping problem for multiple aerial and ground robots.We propose the use of heterogeneous visual landmarks, points and line segments. A large-scale SLAM algorithm is generalized to manage multiple robots, in which a global graph maintains the topological relationships between a series of local sub-maps built by the different robots. Only single camera setups are considered: in order to achieve undelayed initialization, we present a novel parametrization for lines based on anchored Plücker coordinates, to which we add extensible endpoints to enhance their representativeness. The built maps combine such lines with 3D points parametrized in inverse-depth. The overall approach is evaluated with real-data taken with a helicopter and a ground rover in an abandoned village. [387] Teresa Vidal-Calleja, Cyrille Berger and Simon Lacroix. 2009. Event-driven loop closure in multi-robot mapping. In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 1535–1540. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-3803-7. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2009.5354335. A large-scale mapping approach is combined with multiple robots events to achieve cooperative mapping. The mapping approach used is based on hierarchical SLAM -global level and local maps-, which is generalized for the multi-robot case. In particular, the consequences of multi-robot loop closing events (common landmarks detection and relative pose measurement between robots) are analyzed and managed at a global level. We present simulation results for each of these events using aerial and ground robots, and experimental results obtained with ground robots. [386] Alexander Kleiner, Chris Scrapper and Adam Jacoff. 2009. RoboCupRescue Interleague Challenge 2009: Bridging the gap between Simulation and Reality. In In Proc. of the Int. Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS), pages 123–129. The RoboCupRescue initiative, represented by real-robot and simulation league, is designed to foster the research and development of innovative technologies and assistive capabilities to help responders mitigate an emergency response situation. This competition model employed by the RobocupRescue community has proven to be a propitious model, not only for fostering the development of innovative technologies but in the development of test methods used to quantitatively evaluate the performance of these technologies. The Interleague Challenge has been initiated to evaluate real-world performance of algorithms developed in simulation, as well as to drive the development of a common interface to simplify the entry of newcomer teams to the robot league. This paper will discuss the development of emerging test methods used to evaluate robotic-mapping, the development of a common robotic platform, and the development of a novel map evaluation methodology deployed during the RoboCupRescue competition 2009. [385] Dali Sun, Alexander Kleiner and Thomas M. Wendt. 2009. Multi-Robot Range-Only SLAM by Active Sensor Nodes for Urban Search and Rescue. In Robocup 2008: Robot Soccer World Cup XII, pages 318–330. To jointly map an unknown environment with a team of autonomous robots is a challenging problem, particularly in large environments, as for example the devastated area after a disaster. Under such conditions standard methods for Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) are difficult to apply due to possible misinterpretations of sensor data, leading to erroneous data association for loop closure. We consider the problem of multi-robot range-only SLAM for robot teams by solving the data association problem with wireless sensor nodes that we designed for this purpose. The memory of these nodes is utilized for the exchange of map data between multiple robots, facilitating loop-closures on jointly generated maps. We introduce RSLAM, which is a variant of FastSlam, extended for range-only measurements and the multi-robot case. Maps are generated from robot odometry and range estimates, which are computed from the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication). The proposed method has been extensively tested in USARSim, which serves as basis for the Virtual Robots competition at RoboCup, and by real-world experiments with a team of mobile robots. The presented results indicates that the approach is capable of building consistent maps in presence of real sensor noise, as well as to improve mapping results of multiple robots by data sharing. [384] Alexander Kleiner. 2009. Mapping and Exploration for Search and Rescue with Humans and Mobile Robots. Technical Report. University of Freiburg. 227 pages. Note: This is a Ph.D. thesis originally defended at University of Freiburg. Link to Thesis: http://www.google.se/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=ma... Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) is a time critical task since all survivors have to be rescued within the first 72 hours. One goal in Rescue Robotics is to support emergency response by mixed-initiative teams consisting of humans and robots. Their task is to explore the disaster area rapidly while reporting victim locations and hazardous areas to a central station, which then can be utilized for planning rescue missions. To fulfill this task efficiently, humans and robots have to map disaster areas jointly while co- ordinating their search at the same time. Additionally, robots have to perform subproblems, such as victim detection and navigation, autonomously. In disaster areas these problems are extraordinarily challenging due to the unstructured environment and rough terrain. Furthermore, when communication fails, methods that are deployed under such conditions have to be decentralized, i.e. operational without a central station. In this thesis a unified approach joining human and robot resources for solving these problems is contributed. Following the vision of combined multi-robot and multi-human teamwork, core problems, such as position tracking on rough terrain, mapping by mixed teams, and decentralized team coordination with limited radio communication, are directly addressed. More specific, RFID-SLAM, a novel method for robust and efficient loop closure in large-scale environments that utilizes RFID technology for data association, is contributed. The method is capable of jointly improving multiple maps from humans and robots in a centralized and decentralized manner without requiring team members to perform loops on their routes. Thereby positions of humans are tracked by PDR (Pedestrian Dead Reckoning), and robot positions by slippage- sensitive odometry, respectively. The joint-graph emerging from these trajectories serves as an input for an iterative map optimization procedure. The introduced map representation is further utilized for solving the centralized and decentralized coordination of large rescue teams. On the one hand, a deliberate method for combined task assignment and multi-agent path planning, and on the other hand, a local search method using the memory of RFIDs for coordination, are proposed. For autonomous robot navigation on rough terrain and real-time victim detection in disaster areas an efficient method for elevation map building and a novel approach to genetic MRF (Markov Random Field) model optimization are contributed. Finally, a human in the loop architecture is presented that integrates data collected by first responders into a multi-agent system via wearable computing. In this context, the support and coordination of disaster mitigation in large-scale environments from a central-command-post-perspective are described. Methods introduced in this thesis were extensively evaluated in outdoor environments and official USAR testing arenas designed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Furthermore, they were an integral part of systems that won in total more than 10 times the first prize at international competitions, such as the RoboCup world championships. [383] W. Burgard, C. Stachniss, G. Grisetti, B. Steder, R. Kümmerle, C. Dornhege, M. Ruhnke, Alexander Kleiner and Juan D. Tardós. 2009. A Comparison of SLAM Algorithms Based on a Graph of Relations. In IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 2089–2095. IEEE conference proceedings. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2009.5354691. In this paper, we address the problem of creating an objective benchmark for comparing SLAM approaches. We propose a framework for analyzing the results of SLAM approaches based on a metric for measuring the error of the corrected trajectory. The metric uses only relative relations between poses and does not rely on a global reference frame. The idea is related to graph-based SLAM approaches, namely to consider the energy that is needed to deform the trajectory estimated by a SLAM approach into the ground truth trajectory. Our method enables us to compare SLAM approaches that use different estimation techniques or different sensor modalities since all computations are made based on the corrected trajectory of the robot. We provide sets of relative relations needed to compute our metric for an extensive set of datasets frequently used in the SLAM community. The relations have been obtained by manually matching laser-range observations to avoid the errors caused by matching algorithms. Our benchmark framework allows the user an easy analysis and objective comparisons between different SLAM approaches. [382] Alexander Kleiner and C. Dornhege. 2009. Operator-Assistive Mapping in Harsh Environments. In IEEE Int. Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), pages 1–6. IEEE. ISBN: 978-1-4244-5627-7. DOI: 10.1109/SSRR.2009.5424159. Note: (Best Paper Award Finalist) Teleoperation is a difficult task, particularly when controlling robots from an isolated operator station. In general, the operator has to solve nearly blindly the problems of mission planning, target identification, robot navigation, and robot control at the same time. The goal of the proposed system is to support teleoperated navigation with real-time mapping. We present a novel scan matching technique that re-considers data associations during the search, enabling robust pose estimation even under varying roll and pitch angle of the robot enabling mapping on rough terrain. The approach has been implemented as an embedded system and extensively tested on robot platforms designed for teleoperation in critical situations, such as bomb disposal. Furthermore, the system has been evaluated in a test maze by first responders during the Disaster City event in Texas 2008. Finally, experiments conducted within different environments show that the system yields comparably accurate maps in real-time when compared to higher sophisticated offline methods, such as Rao-Blackwellized SLAM. [381] R. Kümmerle, B. Steder, C. Dornhege, Alexander Kleiner, G. Grisetti and W. Burgard. 2009. Large Scale Graph-based SLAM using Aerial Images as Prior Information. In Proceedings of Robotics Science and Systems (RSS). MIT Press. To effectively navigate in their environments and accurately reach their target locations, mobile robots require a globally consistent map of the environment. The problem of learning a map with a mobile robot has been intensively studied in the past and is usually referred to as the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. However, existing solutions to the SLAM problem typically rely on loop-closures to obtain global consistency and do not exploit prior information even if it is available. In this paper, we present a novel SLAM approach that achieves global consistency by utilizing publicly accessible aerial photographs as prior information. Our approach inserts correspondences found between three-dimensional laser range scans and the aerial image as constraints into a graph-based formulation of the SLAM problem. We evaluate our algorithm based on large real-world datasets acquired in a mixed in- and outdoor environment by comparing the global accuracy with state-of-the-art SLAM approaches and GPS. The experimental results demonstrate that the maps acquired with our method show increased global consistency. [380] R. Kümmerle, B. Steder, C. Dornhege, M. Ruhnke, G. Grisetti, C. Stachniss and Alexander Kleiner. 2009. On Measuring the Accuracy of SLAM Algorithms. Autonomous Robots, 27(4):387–407. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s10514-009-9155-6. In this paper, we address the problem of creating an objective benchmark for evaluating SLAM approaches.We propose a framework for analyzing the results of a SLAM approach based on a metric for measuring the error of the corrected trajectory. This metric uses only relative relations between poses and does not rely on a global reference frame. This overcomes serious shortcomings of approaches using a global reference frame to compute the error. Our method furthermore allows us to compare SLAM approaches that use different estimation techniques or different sensor modalities since all computations are made based on the corrected trajectory of the robot. We provide sets of relative relations needed to compute our metric for an extensive set of datasets frequently used in the robotics community. The relations have been obtained by manually matching laser-range observations to avoid the errors caused by matching algorithms. Our benchmark framework allows the user to easily analyze and objectively compare different SLAM approaches. [379] Dov Gabbay and Andrzej Szalas. 2009. Annotation Theories over Finite Graphs. Studia Logica: An International Journal for Symbolic Logic, 93(2-3):147–180. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s11225-009-9220-3. In the current paper we consider theories with vocabulary containing a number of binary and unary relation symbols. Binary relation symbols represent labeled edges of a graph and unary relations represent unique annotations of the graph’s nodes. Such theories, which we call annotation theories, can be used in many applications, including the formalization of argumentation, approximate reasoning, semantics of logic programs, graph coloring, etc. We address a number of problems related to annotation theories over finite models, including satisfiability, querying problem, specification of preferred models and model checking problem. We show that most of considered problems are NPTime- or co-NPTime-complete. In order to reduce the complexity for particular theories, we use second-order quantifier elimination. To our best knowledge none of existing methods works in the case of annotation theories. We then provide a new second-order quantifier elimination method for stratified theories, which is successful in the considered cases. The new result subsumes many other results, including those of [2, 28, 21]. [378] Anna Pernestål, Håkan Warnquist and Mattias Nyberg. 2009. Modeling and Troubleshooting with Interventions Applied to an Auxiliary Truck Braking System. In Proceedings of the 2nd IFAC Workshop on Dependable Control of Discrete Systems (DCDS). [377] Aida Vitoria, Jan Maluszynski and Andrzej Szalas. 2009. Modelling and Reasoning with Paraconsistent Rough Sets. Fundamenta Informaticae, 97(4):405–438. DOI: 10.3233/FI-2009-209. We present a language for defining paraconsistent rough sets and reasoning about them. Our framework relates and brings together two major fields: rough sets [23] and paraconsistent logic programming [9]. To model inconsistent and incomplete information we use a four-valued logic. The language discussed in this paper is based on ideas of our previous work [21, 32, 22] developing a four-valued framework for rough sets. In this approach membership function, set containment and set operations are four-valued, where logical values are t (true), f (false), i (inconsistent) and u (unknown). We investigate properties of paraconsistent rough sets as well as develop a paraconsistent rule language, providing basic computational machinery for our approach. [376] Anna Pernestål, Mattias Nyberg and Håkan Warnquist. 2009. Modeling and Efficient Inference for Troubleshooting Automotive Systems. Technical Report. In series: LiTH-ISY-R #2921. Linköpings universitet. We consider computer assisted troubleshooting of automotive vehicles, where the objective is to repair the vehicle at as low expected cost as possible.The work has three main contributions: a troubleshooting method that applies to troubleshooting in real environments, the discussion on practical issues in modeling for troubleshooting, and the efficient probability computations.The work is based on a case study of an auxiliary braking system of a modern truck.We apply a decision theoretic approach, consisting of a planner and a diagnoser.Two main challenges in troubleshooting automotive vehicles are the need for disassembling the vehicle during troubleshooting to access parts to repair, and the difficulty to verify that the vehicle is fault free. These facts lead to that probabilities for faults and for future observations must be computed for a system that has been subject to external interventions that cause changes the dependency structure. The probability computations are further complicated due to the mixture of instantaneous and non-instantaneous dependencies.To compute the probabilities, we develop a method based on an algorithm, updateBN, that updates a static BN to account for the external interventions. [375] Håkan Warnquist, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2009. Planning as Heuristic Search for Incremental Fault Diagnosis and Repair. In Proceedings of the Scheduling and Planning Applications Workshop (SPARK) at the 19th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). In this paper we study the problem of incremental fault diagnosis and repair of mechatronic systems where the task is to choose actions such that the expected cost of repair is minimal. This is done by interleaving acting with the generation of partial conditional plans used to decide the next action. A diagnostic model based on Bayesian Networks is used to update the current belief state after each action. The planner uses a simplified version of this model to update predicted belief states. We have tested the approach in the domain of troubleshooting heavy vehicles. Experiments show that a simplified model for planning improves performance when troubleshooting with limited time. [374] Håkan Warnquist, Anna Pernestål and Mattias Nyberg. 2009. Anytime Near-Optimal Troubleshooting Applied to a Auxiliary Truck Braking System. In Proceedings of the 7th IFAC Symposium on Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety of Technical Processes, pages 1306–1311. We consider computer assisted troubleshooting of complex systems, for example of a vehicle at a workshop. The objective is to identify the cause of a failure and repair a system at as low expected cost as possible. Three main challenges are: the need for disassembling the system during troubleshooting, the difficulty to verify that the system is fault free, and the dependencies in between components and observations. We present a method that can return a response anytime, which allows us to obtain the best result given the available time. The work is based on a case study of an auxiliary braking system of a modern truck. We highlight practical issues related to model building and troubleshooting in a real environment. [373] Oleg Burdakov, Kaj Holmberg, Patrick Doherty and Per-Magnus Olsson. 2009. Optimal placement of communications relay nodes. Technical Report. In series: LiTH-MAT-R #2009:3. Linköpings universitet. 21 pages. We consider a constrained optimization problem with mixed integer and real variables. It models optimal placement of communications relay nodes in the presence of obstacles. This problem is widely encountered, for instance, in robotics, where it is required to survey some target located in one point and convey the gathered information back to a base station located in another point. One or more unmanned aerial or ground vehicles (UAVs or UGVs) can be used for this purpose as communications relays. The decision variables are the number of unmanned vehicles (UVs) and the UV positions. The objective function is assumed to access the placement quality. We suggest one instance of such a function which is more suitable for accessing UAV placement. The constraints are determined by, firstly, a free line of sight requirement for every consecutive pair in the chain and, secondly, a limited communication range. Because of these requirements, our constrained optimization problem is a difficult multi-extremal problem for any fixed number of UVs. Moreover, the feasible set of real variables is typically disjoint. We present an approach that allows us to efficiently find a practically acceptable approximation to a global minimum in the problem of optimal placement of communications relay nodes. It is based on a spatial discretization with a subsequent reduction to a shortest path problem. The case of a restricted number of available UVs is also considered here. We introduce two label correcting algorithms which are able to take advantage of using some peculiarities of the resulting restricted shortest path problem. The algorithms produce a Pareto solution to the two-objective problem of minimizing the path cost and the number of hops. We justify their correctness. The presented results of numerical 3D experiments show that our algorithms are superior to the conventional Bellman-Ford algorithm tailored to solving this problem. [372] Patrick Doherty and Jonas Kvarnström. 2009. Temporal Action Logics. In V. Lifschitz, F. van Harmelen, and F. Porter, editors, Handbook of Knowledge Representation, pages 709–757. In series: Foundations of Artificial Intelligence #3. Elsevier. ISBN: 978-0-444-52211-5. DOI: 10.1016/S1574-6526(07)03018-0. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/hitlist?d=libris&q=9... The study of frameworks and formalisms for reasoning about action and change [67, 58, 61, 65, 70, 3, 57] has been central to the knowledge representation field almost from the inception of Artificial Intelligence as a general field of research [52, 56]. The phrase “Temporal Action Logics” represents a class of logics for reasoning about action and change that evolved from Sandewall’s book on Features and Fluents [61] and owes much to this ambitious project. There are essentially three major parts to Sandewall’s work. He first developed a narrative-based logical framework for specifying agent behavior in terms of action scenarios. The logical framework is state-based and uses explicit time structures. He then developed a formal framework for assessing the correctness (soundness and completeness) of logics for reasoning about action and change relative to a set of well-defined intended conclusions, where reasoning problems were classified according to their ontological or epistemological characteristics. Finally, he proposed a number of logics defined semantically in terms of definitions of preferential entailment1 and assessed their correctness using his assessment framework. [371] Martin Magnusson, David Landén and Patrick Doherty. 2009. Logical Agents that Plan, Execute, and Monitor Communication. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning (LSIR-2). [370] Martin Magnusson and Patrick Doherty. 2009. Planning Speech Acts in a Logic of Action and Change. In Fredrik Heintz and Jonas Kvarnström, editors, The Swedish AI Society Workshop 2009, SAIS 2009, pages 39–48. In series: Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings #35. Linköping University Electronic Press, Linköpings universitet. Fulltext: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/035/008/ecp0935... Cooperation is a complex task that necessarily involves communication and reasoning about others’ intentions and beliefs. Multi-agent communication languages aid designers of cooperating robots through standardized speech acts, sometimes including a formal semantics. But a more direct approach would be to have the robots plan both regular and communicative actions themselves. We show how two robots with heterogeneous capabilities can autonomously decide to cooperate when faced with a task that would otherwise be impossible. Request and inform speech acts are formulated in the same first-order logic of action and change as is used for regular actions. This is made possible by treating the contents of communicative actions as quoted formulas of the same language. The robot agents then use a natural deduction theorem prover to generate cooperative plans for an example scenario by reasoning directly with the axioms of the theory. [369] Patrick Doherty, Jonas Kvarnström and Fredrik Heintz. 2009. A Temporal Logic-based Planning and Execution Monitoring Framework for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 19(3):332–377. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s10458-009-9079-8. Research with autonomous unmanned aircraft systems is reaching a new degree of sophistication where targeted missions require complex types of deliberative capability integrated in a practical manner in such systems. Due to these pragmatic constraints, integration is just as important as theoretical and applied work in developing the actual deliberative functionalities. In this article, we present a temporal logic-based task planning and execution monitoring framework and its integration into a fully deployed rotor-based unmanned aircraft system developed in our laboratory. We use a very challenging emergency services application involving body identification and supply delivery as a vehicle for showing the potential use of such a framework in real-world applications. TALplanner, a temporal logic-based task planner, is used to generate mission plans. Building further on the use of TAL (Temporal Action Logic), we show how knowledge gathered from the appropriate sensors during plan execution can be used to create state structures, incrementally building a partial logical model representing the actual development of the system and its environment over time. We then show how formulas in the same logic can be used to specify the desired behavior of the system and its environment and how violations of such formulas can be detected in a timely manner in an execution monitor subsystem. The pervasive use of logic throughout the higher level deliberative layers of the system architecture provides a solid shared declarative semantics that facilitates the transfer of knowledge between different modules. [368] Fredrik Heintz, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2009. Stream Reasoning in DyKnow: A Knowledge Processing Middleware System. In Proceedings of the Stream Reasoning Workshop. In series: CEUR Workshop Proceedings #466. M. Jeusfeld c/o Redaktion Sun SITE, Informatik V, RWTH Aachen. The information available to modern autonomous systems is often in the form of streams. As the number of sensors and other stream sources increases there is a growing need for incremental reasoning about the incomplete content of sets of streams in order to draw relevant conclusions and react to new situations as quickly as possible. To act rationally, autonomous agents often depend on high level reasoning components that require crisp, symbolic knowledge about the environment. Extensive processing at many levels of abstraction is required to generate such knowledge from noisy, incomplete and quantitative sensor data. We define knowledge processing middleware as a systematic approach to integrating and organizing such processing, and argue that connecting processing components with streams provides essential support for steady and timely flows of information. DyKnow is a concrete and implemented instantiation of such middleware, providing support for stream reasoning at several levels. First, the formal KPL language allows the specification of streams connecting knowledge processes and the required properties of such streams. Second, chronicle recognition incrementally detects complex events from streams of more primitive events. Third, complex metric temporal formulas can be incrementally evaluated over streams of states. DyKnow and the stream reasoning techniques are described and motivated in the context of a UAV traffic monitoring application. [367] Fredrik Heintz and Jonas Kvarnström. 2009. Proceedings of the Swedish AI Society Workshop 2009. Conference Proceedings. In series: Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings #35. Linköping University Electronic Press, Linköpings universitet. 65 pages. Link to Book: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/035/ [366] Andrzej Szalas and Alicja Szalas. 2009. Paraconsistent Reasoning with Words. In Aspects of Natural Language Processing: Essays Dedicated to Leonard Bolc on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday, pages 43–58. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #5070. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-642-04734-3. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-04735-0_2. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/bib/11741557 Fuzzy logics are one of the most frequent approaches to model uncertainty and vagueness. In the case of fuzzy modeling, degrees of belief and disbelief sum up to 1, which causes problems in modeling the lack of knowledge and inconsistency. Therefore, so called paraconsistent intuitionistic fuzzy sets have been introduced, where the degrees of belief and disbelief are not required to sum up to 1. The situation when this sum is smaller than 1 reflects the lack of knowledge and its value greater than 1 models inconsistency. In many applications there is a strong need to guide and interpret fuzzy-like reasoning using qualitative approaches. To achieve this goal in the presence of uncertainty, lack of knowledge and inconsistency, we provide a framework for qualitative interpretation of the results of fuzzy-like reasoning by labeling numbers with words, like true, false, inconsistent, unknown, reflecting truth values of a suitable, usually finitely valued logical formalism. [365] Andrzej Szalas and Dov Gabbay. 2009. Voting by Eliminating Quantifiers. Studia Logica: An International Journal for Symbolic Logic, 92(3):365–379. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s11225-009-9200-7. Mathematical theory of voting and social choice has attracted much attention. In the general setting one can view social choice as a method of aggregating individual, often conflicting preferences and making a choice that is the best compromise. How preferences are expressed and what is the “best compromise” varies and heavily depends on a particular situation. The method we propose in this paper depends on expressing individual preferences of voters and specifying properties of the resulting ranking by means of first-order formulas. Then, as a technical tool, we use methods of second-order quantifier elimination to analyze and compute results of voting. We show how to specify voting, how to compute resulting rankings and how to verify voting protocols. [364] Andrzej Szalas and Linh Anh Nguyen. 2009. EXPTIME Tableaux for Checking Satisfiability of a Knowledge Base in the Description Logic ALC. In Ngoc Thanh; Kowalczyk, Ryszard; Chen, Shyi-Ming, editors, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence - Semantic Web, Social Networks & Multiagent Systems (ICCCI), pages 437–448. In series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #5796. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-642-04440-3. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-04441-0_38. We give the first ExpTime (optimal) tableau decision procedure for checking satisfiability of a knowledge base in the description logic ALC, not based on transformation that encodes ABoxes by nominals or terminology axioms. Our procedure can be implemented as an extension of the highly optimized tableau prover TGC [12] to obtain an efficient program for the mentioned satisfiability problem. [363] Martin Magnusson, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2009. Abductive Reasoning with Filtered Circumscription. In Proceedings of the IJCAI-09 Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action and Change (NRAC). UTSePress. ISBN: 978-0-9802840-7-2. For logical artificial intelligence to be truly useful,its methods must scale to problems of realistic size.An interruptible algorithm enables a logical agentto act in a timely manner to the best of its knowledge,given its reasoning so far. This seems necessaryto avoid analysis paralysis, trying to thinkof every potentiality, however unlikely, beforehand.These considerations prompt us to look for alternativereasoning mechanisms for filtered circumscription,a nonmonotonic reasoning formalism usede.g. by Temporal Action Logic and Event Calculus.We generalize Ginsberg’s circumscriptive theoremprover and describe an interruptible theoremprover based on abduction that has been used tounify planning and reasoning in a logical agent architecture. [362] Fredrik Heintz, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2009. A Stream-Based Hierarchical Anchoring Framework. In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems (IROS). IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-3803-7. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2009.5354372. IEEE Xplore: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.j... [361] M. Wiggberg and Peter Dalenius. 2009. Bridges and problem solving: Swedish engineering students' conceptions of engineering in 2007. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU), pages 5–12. ISBN: 978-989-8111-82-1. Swedish engineering students conceptions of engineering is investigated by a large nation-wide study in ten Swedish higher education institutions. Based on data from surveys and interviews, categories and top-lists, a picture of students conceptions of engineering is presented. Students conceptions of engineering, are somewhat divergent, but dealing with problems and their solutions and creativity are identified as core concepts. The survey data is in general more varied and deals with somewhat different kinds of terms. When explicitly asking for five engineering terms, as in the survey, a broader picture arises including terms, or concepts, denoting how students think of engineering and work in a more personal way. For example, words like hard work, stressful, challenging, interesting, and fun are used. On the other hand, it seems like the interviewed students tried to give more general answers that were not always connected to their personal experiences. Knowledge on students conceptions of engineering is essential for practitioners in engineering education. By information on students conceptions, the teaching can approach students at their particular mindset of the engineering field. Program managers with responsibility for design of engineering programs would also benefit using information on students conceptions of engineering. Courses could be motivated and contextualized in order to connect with the students. Recruitment officers would also have an easier time marketing why people should chose the engineering track. [360] Linh Anh Nguyen and Andrzej Szalas. 2009. A tableau calculus for regular grammar logics with converse. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE), pages 421–436. In series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #5663. Springer. ISBN: 978-364202958-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-02959-2_31. We give a sound and complete tableau calculus for deciding the general satisfiability problem of regular grammar logics with converse (REG c logics). Tableaux of our calculus are defined as \"and-or\" graphs with global caching. Our calculus extends the tableau calculus for regular grammar logics given by Goré and Nguyen [11] by using a cut rule and existential automaton-modal operators to deal with converse. We use it to develop an ExpTime (optimal) tableau decision procedure for the general satisfiability problem of REG c logics. We also briefly discuss optimizations for the procedure. [359] Gianpaolo Conte and Patrick Doherty. 2009. Vision-Based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation Using Geo-Referenced Information. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, 2009(387308):1–18. Hindawi Publishing Corporation. DOI: 10.1155/2009/387308. This paper investigates the possibility of augmenting an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation system with a passive video camera in order to cope with long-term GPS outages. The paper proposes a vision-based navigation architecture which combines inertial sensors, visual odometry, and registration of the on-board video to a geo-referenced aerial image. The vision-aided navigation system developed is capable of providing high-rate and drift-free state estimation for UAV autonomous navigation without the GPS system. Due to the use of image-to-map registration for absolute position calculation, drift-free position performance depends on the structural characteristics of the terrain. Experimental evaluation of the approach based on offline flight data is provided. In addition the architecture proposed has been implemented on-board an experimental UAV helicopter platform and tested during vision-based autonomous flights. [358] Gianpaolo Conte. 2009. Vision-Based Localization and Guidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #1260. Linköping University Electronic Press. 174 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7393-603-3. The thesis has been developed as part of the requirements for a PhD degree at the Artificial Intelligence and Integrated Computer System division (AIICS) in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Linköping University.The work focuses on issues related to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation, in particular in the areas of guidance and vision-based autonomous flight in situations of short and long term GPS outage.The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part presents a helicopter simulator and a path following control mode developed and implemented on an experimental helicopter platform. The second part presents an approach to the problem of vision-based state estimation for autonomous aerial platforms which makes use of geo-referenced images for localization purposes. The problem of vision-based landing is also addressed with emphasis on fusion between inertial sensors and video camera using an artificial landing pad as reference pattern. In the last chapter, a solution to a vision-based ground object geo-location problem using a fixed-wing micro aerial vehicle platform is presented.The helicopter guidance and vision-based navigation methods developed in the thesis have been implemented and tested in real flight-tests using a Yamaha Rmax helicopter. Extensive experimental flight-test results are presented. [357] Tommy Persson. 2009. Evaluating the use of DyKnow in multi-UAV traffic monitoring applications. Student Thesis. 75 pages. ISRN: LIU-IDA/LITH-EX-A--09/019--SE. This Master’s thesis describes an evaluation of the stream-based knowledge pro-cessing middleware framework DyKnow in multi-UAV traffic monitoring applica-tions performed at Saab Aerosystems. The purpose of DyKnow is “to providegeneric and well-structured software support for the processes involved in gen-erating state, object, and event abstractions about the environments of complexsystems.\" It does this by providing the concepts of streams, sources, computa-tional units (CUs), entity frames and chronicles.This evaluation is divided into three parts: A general quality evaluation ofDyKnow using the ISO 9126-1 quality model, a discussion of a series of questionsregarding the specific use and functionality of DyKnow and last, a performanceevaluation. To perform parts of this evaluation, a test application implementinga traffic monitoring scenario was developed using DyKnow and the Java AgentDEvelopment Framework (JADE).The quality evaluation shows that while DyKnow suffers on the usability side,the suitability, accuracy and interoperability were all given high marks.The results of the performance evaluation high-lights the factors that affect thememory and CPU requirements of DyKnow. It is shown that the most significantfactor in the demand placed on the CPU is the number of CUs and streams. Italso shows that DyKnow may suffer dataloss and severe slowdown if the CPU istoo heavily utilized. However, a reasonably sized DyKnow application, such as thescenario implemented in this report, should run without problems on systems atleast half as fast as the one used in the tests. [356] Fredrik  Heintz. 2009. DyKnow: A Stream-Based Knowledge Processing Middleware Framework. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #1240. Linköping University Electronic Press. 258 pages. ISBN: 978–91–7393–696–5. As robotic systems become more and more advanced the need to integrate existing deliberative functionalities such as chronicle recognition, motion planning, task planning, and execution monitoring increases. To integrate such functionalities into a coherent system it is necessary to reconcile the different formalisms used by the functionalities to represent information and knowledge about the world. To construct and integrate these representations and maintain a correlation between them and the environment it is necessary to extract information and knowledge from data collected by sensors. However, deliberative functionalities tend to assume symbolic and crisp knowledge about the current state of the world while the information extracted from sensors often is noisy and incomplete quantitative data on a much lower level of abstraction. There is a wide gap between the information about the world normally acquired through sensing and the information that is assumed to be available for reasoning about the world.As physical autonomous systems grow in scope and complexity, bridging the gap in an ad-hoc manner becomes impractical and inefficient. Instead a principled and systematic approach to closing the sensereasoning gap is needed. At the same time, a systematic solution has to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate a wide range of components with highly varying demands. We therefore introduce the concept of knowledge processing middleware for a principled and systematic software framework for bridging the gap between sensing and reasoning in a physical agent. A set of requirements that all such middleware should satisfy is also described.A stream-based knowledge processing middleware framework called DyKnow is then presented. Due to the need for incremental refinement of information at different levels of abstraction, computations and processes within the stream-based knowledge processing framework are modeled as active and sustained knowledge processes working on and producing streams. DyKnow supports the generation of partial and context dependent stream-based representations of past, current, and potential future states at many levels of abstraction in a timely manner.To show the versatility and utility of DyKnow two symbolic reasoning engines are integrated into Dy-Know. The first reasoning engine is a metric temporal logical progression engine. Its integration is made possible by extending DyKnow with a state generation mechanism to generate state sequences over which temporal logical formulas can be progressed. The second reasoning engine is a chronicle recognition engine for recognizing complex events such as traffic situations. The integration is facilitated by extending DyKnow with support for anchoring symbolic object identifiers to sensor data in order to collect information about physical objects using the available sensors. By integrating these reasoning engines into DyKnow, they can be used by any knowledge processing application. Each integration therefore extends the capability of DyKnow and increases its applicability.To show that DyKnow also has a potential for multi-agent knowledge processing, an extension is presented which allows agents to federate parts of their local DyKnow instances to share information and knowledge.Finally, it is shown how DyKnow provides support for the functionalities on the different levels in the JDL Data Fusion Model, which is the de facto standard functional model for fusion applications. The focus is not on individual fusion techniques, but rather on an infrastructure that permits the use of many different fusion techniques in a unified framework.The main conclusion of this thesis is that the DyKnow knowledge processing middleware framework provides appropriate support for bridging the sense-reasoning gap in a physical agent. This conclusion is drawn from the fact that DyKnow has successfully been used to integrate different reasoning engines into complex unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications and that it satisfies all the stated requirements for knowledge processing middleware to a significant degree. 2008 [355] Gianpaolo Conte and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Use of Geo-referenced Images with Unmanned Aerial Systems. In Workshop Proceedings of SIMPAR 2008, International Conference on Simulation, Modeling and Programming for Autonomous Robots. Venice(Italy) 2008 November,3-4., pages 444–454. ISBN: 978-88-95872-01-8. [354] Cyrille Berger and Simon Lacroix. 2008. Modélisation de l'environnement par facettes planes pour la Cartographie et la Localisation Simultanées par stéréovision. In Reconnaissance des Formes et Intelligence Artificielle (RFIA). [353] Cyrille Berger and Simon Lacroix. 2008. Using planar facets for stereovision SLAM. In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems (IROS), pages 1606–1611. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-2057-5. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2008.4650986. In the context of stereovision SLAM, we propose a way to enrich the landmark models. Vision-based SLAM approaches usually rely on interest points associated to a point in the Cartesian space: by adjoining oriented planar patches (if they are present in the environment), we augment the landmark description with an oriented frame. Thanks to this additional information, the robot pose is fully observable with the perception of a single landmark, and the knowledge of the patches orientation helps the matching of landmarks. The paper depicts the chosen landmark model, the way to extract and match them, and presents some SLAM results obtained with such landmarks. [352] Christian Dornhege, Alexander Kleiner, Rainer Kümmerle, Bastian Steder, Wolfram Burgard and Bernhard Nebel. 2008. SP-Freiburg TechX Challenge Technical Paper. In TechX Challenge. Note: Finalist In this paper we introduce our team’s approach to the TechX Challenge, which is based on experiences gathered at RoboCup during the last seven years and recent efforts in robotic research. We particularly focus on Multi-Level Surface (MLS) maps based localization, behavior map based path planning and obstacle negotiation, robot motion planning using a probabilistic roadmap planner, vision and 3D laser supported target detection, which all will be more detailed in the following sections. [351] Alexander Kleiner, Gerald Steinbauer and Franz Wotawa. 2008. Towards Automated Online Diagnosis of Robot Navigation Software. In Proc. of Int. Conf. on Simulation, Modeling and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR), pages 159–170. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #5325. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-89076-8_18. Control software of autonomous mobile robots comprises a number of software modules that typically interact in a very complex way. Their proper interaction and the robustness of each single module strongly influences the safety during navigation in the field. Particularly in unstructured environments, unforeseen situations are likely to occur, causing erroneous behaviors of the robot. The proper handling of such situations requires an understanding of cause and effect within the complex interactions of the system. In this paper we present an approach which is able to automatically derive a model of the communication behavior within a component-orientated control software. The model can be used for online diagnosis in order to increase system robustness during runtime. We demonstrate model learning and system diagnosis on three different robot systems which were controlled by software modules communicating based on the widely used IPC (Inter Process Communication) standard. The demonstrated learning and diagnosis was carried out without any a priori knowledge about the systems. [350] Alexander Kleiner, Gerald Steinbauer and Franz Wotawa. 2008. Automated Learning of Communication Models for Robot Control Software. In MBS 2008 - Workshop on Model-Based Systems, 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI). Control software of autonomous mobile robots comprises a number of software modules which show very rich behaviors and interact in a very complex manner. These facts among others have a strong influence on the robustness of robot con- trol software in the field. In this paper we present an approach which is able to automatically derive a model of the structure and the behavior of the communication within a component- orientated control software. Such a model can be used for on-line model-based diagnosis in order to increase the robust- ness of the software by allowing the robot to autonomously cope with faults occurred during runtime. Due to the fact that the model is learned form recorded data and the use of the popular publisher-subscriber paradigm the approach can be applied to a wide range of complex and even partially un- known systems. [349] Anders Holmberg and Per-Magnus Olsson. 2008. Route Planning for Relay UAV. In Proceedings of the 26th International Congress of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS). Optimage Ltd.. ISBN: ISBN 0-9533991-9-2. To expand the operative area for surveillance UAV, we propose the use of a relay UAV. The relay UAV is used as an intermediary node in a communication network: the surveillance UAV transmits data to the relay UAV, which sends it back to a ground station. In this exploratory report, we calculate the route for a relay UAV, to ensure communication at certain time points, given the route of the surveillance UAV. The results presented here are preliminary and may be considered a first iteration of ideas and methods. [348] Joe Steinhauer. 2008. Object Configuration Reconstruction from Descriptions using Relative and Intrinsic Reference Frames. In ECAI 2008, pages 821–822. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #178. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-58603-891-5. DOI: 10.3233/978-1-58603-891-5-821. We provide a technique to reconstruct an object configuration that has been described on site by only using intrinsic and relative frames of reference into an absolute frame of reference, as seen from the survey perspective. [347] Per Nyblom and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Towards Automatic Model Generation by Optimization. In Proceedings of the Tenth Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), pages 114–123. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #173. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-58603-867-0, e-978-1-60750-335-4. Link to publication: http://www.booksonline.iospress.nl/Conte... The problem of automatically selecting simulation models for autonomous agents depending on their current intentions and beliefs is considered in this paper. The intended use of the models is for prediction, filtering, planning and other types of reasoning that can be performed with Simulation models. The parameters and model fragments of the resulting model are selected by formulating and solving a hybrid constrained optimization problem that captures the intuition of the preferred model when relevance information about the elements of the world being modelled is taken into consideration. A specialized version of the original optimization problem is developed that makes it possible to solve the continuous subproblem analytically in linear time. A practical model selection problem is discussed where the aim is to select suitable parameters and models for tracking dynamic objects. Experiments with randomly generated problem instances indicate that a hillclimbing search approach might be both efficient and provides reasonably good solutions compared to simulated annealing and hillclimbing with random restarts. [346] Rickard Karlsson, Thomas Schön, David Törnqvist, Gianpolo Conte and Fredrik Gustafsson. 2008. Utilizing Model Structure for Efficient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping for a UAV Application. Technical Report. In series: LiTH-ISY-R #2836. Linköping University Electronic Press. 10 pages. This contribution aims at unifying two recent trends in applied particle filtering (PF). The first trend is the major impact in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) applications, utilizing the FastSLAM algorithm. Thesecond one is the implications of the marginalized particle filter (MPF) or the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) in positioning and tracking applications. Using the standard FastSLAM algorithm, only low-dimensional vehicle modelsare computationally feasible. In this work, an algorithm is introduced which merges FastSLAM and MPF, and the result is an algorithm for SLAM applications, where state vectors of higher dimensions can be used. Results using experimental data from a UAV (helicopter) are presented. The algorithmfuses measurements from on-board inertial sensors (accelerometer and gyro) and vision in order to solve the SLAM problem, i.e., enable navigation over a long period of time. [345] Håkan Warnquist and Mattias Nyberg. 2008. A Heuristic for Near-Optimal Troubleshooting Using AO*. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Principles of Diagnosis. When troubleshooting malfunctioning technical equipment, the task is to locate faults and make repairsuntil the equipment functions properly again. The AO* algorithm can be used to find troubleshootingstrategies that are optimal in the sense that the expected cost of repair is minimal. We have adaptedthe AO* algorithm for troubleshooting in the automotive domain with limited time. We propose a newheuristic based on entropy. By using this heuristic, near-optimal strategies can be found within a fixedtime limit. This is shown in empirical studies on a fuel injection system of a truck. In these results, theAO* algorithm using the new heuristic, performs better than other troubleshooting algorithms. [344] Håkan Warnquist, Mattias Nyberg and Petter Säby. 2008. Troubleshooting when Action Costs are Dependent with Application to a Truck Engine. In 10th Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, SCAI 2008, pages 68–75. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #173. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-58603-867-0, e-978-1-60750-335-4. Link to paper: http://books.google.se/books?id=eju691VM... We propose a troubleshooting algorithm that can troubleshoot systems with dependent action costs. When actions are performed they may change the way the system is decomposed and affect the cost of future actions. We present a way to model this by extending the traditional troubleshooting model with an additional state that describes which parts of the system that are decomposed. The proposed troubleshooting algorithm searches an AND/OR graph with the aim of finding the repair plan that minimizes the expected cost of repair. We present the heuristics needed to speed up the search and make it competitive with other troubleshooting algorithms. Finally, the performance of the algorithm is evaluated on a probabilistic model of a fuel injection system of a truck.We show that the expected cost of repair can be reduced when compared with an algorithm from previous literature. [343] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2008. Extending the concept of publication: Factbases and knowledgebases. Learned Publishing, 21(2):123–131. Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. DOI: 10.1087/095315108X288893. The concept of a 'publication' no longer applies only to printed works, information technology has extended its application to several other types of works. This article describes a facility called the Common Knowledge Library that publishes modules of formally structured information representing facts and knowledge of various kinds. Publications of this new type have some characteristics in common with databases, and others in common with software modules, however, they also share some important characteristics with traditional publications. A framework for citation of previous work is important in order to provide an incentive for contributors of such modules. Peer review - the traditional method of quality assurance for scientific articles - must also be applied, although in a modified form, for fact and knowledge modules. The construction of the Common Knowledge Library is a cumulative process, new contributions are obtained by interpreting the contents of existing knowledge sources on the Internet, and the existing contents of the Library are an important resource for that interpretation process. [342] Gianpaolo Conte and Patrick Doherty. 2008. An Integrated UAV Navigation System Based on Aerial Image Matching. In IEEE Aerospace Conference 2008,2008, pages 3142–3151. In series: IEEE Aerospace Conference #??. IEEE. ISBN: 978-1-4244-1487-1, 978-1-4244-1488-8. DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2008.4526556. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of using geo-referenced satellite or aerial images to augment an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation system in case of GPS failure. A vision based navigation system which combines inertial sensors, visual odometer and registration of a UAV on-board video to a given geo-referenced aerial image has been developed and tested on real flight-test data. The experimental results show that it is possible to extract useful position information from aerial imagery even when the UAV is flying at low altitude. It is shown that such information can be used in an automated way to compensate the drift of the UAV state estimation which occurs when only inertial sensors and visual odometer are used. [341] Gianpaolo Conte, Maria Hempel, Piotr Rudol, David Lundström, Simone Duranti, Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2008. High Accuracy Ground Target Geo-Location Using Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle Platforms. In Proceedings of the AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference (GNC). AIAA. ISBN: 978-1-56347-945-8. This paper presents a method for high accuracy ground target localization using a Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) equipped with a video camera sensor. The proposed method is based on a satellite or aerial image registration technique. The target geo-location is calculated by registering the ground target image taken from an on-board video camera with a geo- referenced satellite image. This method does not require accurate knowledge of the aircraft position and attitude, therefore it is especially suitable for MAV platforms which do not have the capability to carry accurate sensors due to their limited payload weight and power resources. The paper presents results of a ground target geo-location experiment based on an image registration technique. The platform used is a MAV prototype which won the 3rd US-European Micro Aerial Vehicle Competition (MAV07). In the experiment a ground object was localized with an accuracy of 2.3 meters from a ight altitude of 70 meters. [340] Piotr Rudol and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Human Body Detection and Geolocalization for UAV Search and Rescue Missions Using Color and Thermal Imagery. In Proceedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conference, pages 1–8. In series: Aerospace Conference Proceedings #2008. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-1487-1. DOI: 10.1109/Aero.2008.4526559. Recent advances in the field of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) make flying robots suitable platforms for carrying sensors and computer systems capable of performing advanced tasks. This paper presents a technique which allows detecting humans at a high frame rate on standard hardware onboard an autonomous UAV in a real-world outdoor environment using thermal and color imagery. Detected human positions are geolocated and a map of points of interest is built. Such a saliency map can, for example, be used to plan medical supply delivery during a disaster relief effort. The technique has been implemented and tested on-board the UAVTech1 autonomous unmanned helicopter platform as a part of a complete autonomous mission. The results of flight- tests are presented and performance and limitations of the technique are discussed. [339] Andrzej Szalas. 2008. Towards Incorporating Background Theories into Quantifier Elimination. Journal of applied non-classical logics, 18(2-3):325–340. Éditions Hermès-Lavoisier. DOI: 10.3166/jancl.18.325­-340. In the paper we present a technique for eliminating quantifiers of arbitrary order, in particular of first-order. Such a uniform treatment of the elimination problem has been problematic up to now, since techniques for eliminating first-order quantifiers do not scale up to higher-order contexts and those for eliminating higher-order quantifiers are usually based on a form of monotonicity w.r.t implication (set inclusion) and are not applicable to the first-order case. We make a shift to arbitrary relations \"ordering\" the underlying universe. This allows us to incorporate background theories into higher-order quantifier elimination methods which, up to now, has not been achieved. The technique we propose subsumes many other results, including the Ackermann's lemma and various forms of fixpoint approaches when the \"ordering\" relations are interpreted as implication and reveals the common principle behind these approaches. [338] Erik Sandewall. 2008. Artificial Intelligence Needs Open-Access Knowledgebase Contents. In Proceedings of the 23rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages 1602–1605. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-368-3, 978-1-57735-367-6. Note: Senior Members track A substantial knowledgebase is an important part of many A.I. applications as well as (arguably) in any system that is claimed to implement broad-range intelligence. Although this has been an accepted view in our field since very long, little progress has been made towards the establishment of large and sharable knowledgebases. Both basic research projects and applications projects have found it necessary to construct special-purpose knowledgebases for their respective needs. This is obviously a problem: it would save work and speed up progress if the construction of a broadly sharable and broadly useful knowledgebase could be a joint undertaking for the field. In this article I wish to discuss the possibilities and the obstacles in this respect. I shall argue that the field of Knowledge Representation needs to adopt a new and very different paradigm in order for progress to be made, so that besides working as usual on logical foundations and on algorithms, we should also devote substantial efforts to the systematic preparation of knowledgebase contents. [337] Patrick Doherty and Andrzej Szalas. 2008. Reasoning with Qualitative Preferences and Cardinalities Using Generalized Circumscription. In Gerhard Brewka, Jérôme Lang, editors, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), pages 560–570. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-384-3. The topic of preference modeling has recently attracted the interest of a number of sub-disciplines in artificial intelligence such as the nonmonotonic reasoning and action and change communities. The approach in these communities focuses on qualitative preferences and preference models which provide more natural representations from a~commonsense perspective. In this paper, we show how generalized circumscription can be used as a highly expressive framework for qualitative preference modeling. Generalized circumscription proposed by Lifschitz allows for predicates (and thus formulas) to be minimized relative to arbitrary pre-orders (reflexive and transitive). Although it has received little attention, we show how it may be used to model and reason about elaborate qualitative preference relations. One of the perceived weaknesses with any type of circumscription is the 2nd-order nature of the representation. The paper shows how a large variety of preference theories represented using generalized circumscription can in fact be reduced to logically equivalent first-order theories in a constructive way. Finally, we also show how preference relations represented using general circumscription can be extended with cardinality constraints and when these extensions can also be reduced to logically equivalent first-order theories. [336] Dov M. Gabbay, Renate A. Schmidt and Andrzej Szalas. 2008. Second-Order Quantifier Elimination. Foundations, Computational Aspects and Applications. Book. In series: Studies in Logics #12. College Publications. 308 pages. ISBN: 978-1-904987-56-7, 1-904-98-756-7. link: http://www.amazon.com/Second-Order-Quant... In recent years there has been an increasing use of logical methods and significant new developments have been spawned in several areas of computer science, ranging from artificial intelligence and software engineering to agent-based systems and the semantic web. In the investigation and application of logical methods there is a tension between: * the need for a representational language strong enough to express domain knowledge of a particular application, and the need for a logical formalism general enough to unify several reasoning facilities relevant to the application, on the one hand, and * the need to enable computationally feasible reasoning facilities, on the other hand. Second-order logics are very expressive and allow us to represent domain knowledge with ease, but there is a high price to pay for the expressiveness. Most second-order logics are incomplete and highly undecidable. It is the quantifiers which bind relation symbols that make second-order logics computationally unfriendly. It is therefore desirable to eliminate these second-order quantifiers, when this is mathematically possible; and often it is. If second-order quantifiers are eliminable we want to know under which conditions, we want to understand the principles and we want to develop methods for second-order quantifier elimination. This book provides the first comprehensive, systematic and uniform account of the state-of-the-art of second-order quantifier elimination in classical and non-classical logics. It covers the foundations, it discusses in detail existing second-order quantifier elimination methods, and it presents numerous examples of applications and non-standard uses in different areas. These include: * classical and non-classical logics, * correspondence and duality theory, * knowledge representation and description logics, * commonsense reasoning and approximate reasoning, * relational and deductive databases, and * complexity theory. The book is intended for anyone interested in the theory and application of logics in computer science and artificial intelligence. [335] Erik Sandewall. 2008. The Leordo Computation System. In Yves Bertot, Gérard Huet, Jean-Jacques Lévy, Gordon Plotkin., editors, From Semantics to Computer Science: Essays in Honour of Gilles Kahn, pages 309–336. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-05-21-51825-3, 978-05-11-77052-4. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511770524.015. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/bib/12013235 läs hela texten: http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?bi... link: http://www.amazon.com/From-Semantics-Com... Gilles Kahn was one of the most influential figures in the development of computer science and information technology, not only in Europe but throughout the world. This volume of articles by several leading computer scientists serves as a fitting memorial to Kahn's achievements and reflects the broad range of subjects to which he contributed through his scientific research and his work at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. The editors also reflect upon the future of computing: how it will develop as a subject in itself and how it will affect other disciplines, from biology and medical informatics, to web and networks in general. Its breadth of coverage, topicality, originality and depth of contribution, make this book a stimulating read for all those interested in the future development of information technology. [334] H.Joe Steinhauer. 2008. Object Configuration Reconstruction from Incomplete Binary Object Relation Descriptions. In Dengel, A.; Berns, K.; Breuel, Th.; Bomarius, F.; Roth-Berghofer, Th.R., editors, Proceedings of the 31st German Conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence (KI), pages 348–355. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #5243. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-85844-7. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-85845-4_43. We present a process for reconstructing object configurations described by a set of spatial constraints of the form (A northeast B) into a two-dimensional grid. The reconstruction process is cognitively easy for a person to fulfill and guides the user to avoid typical mistakes. For underspecified object configuration descriptions we suggest a strategy to handle coarse object relationships by representing a coarse object in a way that all disjunctive basic relationships that the coarse relationship consists of are represented within one reconstruction. [333] Erik Sandewall. 2008. A Review of the Handbook of Knowledge Representation. Artificial Intelligence, 172(18):1965–1966. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2008.10.002. The newly appeared Handbook of Knowledge Representation is an impressive piece of work. Its three editors and its forty-five contributors have produced twenty-five concise, textbook-style chapters that introduce most of the major aspects of the science of knowledge representation. Reading this book is a very positive experience: it demonstrates the breadth, the depth and the coherence that our field has achieved by now. [332] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2008. DyKnow Federations: Distributing and Merging Information Among UAVs. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION). IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-3-8007-3092-6. As unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications become more complex and versatile there is an increasing need to allow multiple UAVs to cooperate to solve problems which are beyond the capability of each individual UAV. To provide more complete and accurate information about the environment we present a DyKnow federation framework for information integration in multi-node networks of UAVs. A federation is created and maintained using a multiagent delegation framework and allows UAVs to share local information as well as process information from other UAVs as if it were local using the DyKnow knowledge processing middleware framework. The work is presented in the context of a multi UAV traffic monitoring scenario. [331] Martin Magnusson and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Temporal Action Logic for Question Answering in an Adventure Game. In Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2008, pages 236–247. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #15. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-58603-833-5. Inhabiting the complex and dynamic environments of modern computer games with autonomous agents capable of intelligent timely behaviour is a significant research challenge. We illustrate this using Our own attempts to build a practical agent architecture on it logicist foundation. In the ANDI-Land adventure game concept players solve puzzles by eliciting information from computer characters through natural language question answering. While numerous challenges immediately presented themselves, they took on a form of concrete and accessible problems to solve, and we present some of our initial solutions. We conclude that games, due to their demand for human-like computer characters with robust and independent operation in large simulated worlds, might serve as excellent test beds for research towards artificial general intelligence. [330] Martin Magnusson, David Landén and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Planning, Executing, and Monitoring Communication in a Logic-Based Multi-Agent System. In ECAI 2008, pages 933–934. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #178. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-58603-891-5. DOI: 10.3233/978-1-58603-891-5-933. [329] Martin Magnusson and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Deductive Planning with Inductive Loops. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), pages 528–534. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-384-3. Agents plan to achieve and maintain goals. Maintenance that requires continuous action excludes the representation of plans as finite sequences of actions. If there is no upper bound on the number of actions, a simple list of actions would be infinitely long. Instead, a compact representation requires some form of looping construct. We look at a specific temporally extended maintenance goal, multiple target video surveillance, and formalize it in Temporal Action Logic. The logic's representation of time as the natural numbers suggests using mathematical induction to deductively plan to satisfy temporally extended goals. Such planning makes use of a sound and useful, but incomplete, induction rule that compactly represents the solution as a recursive fixpoint formula. Two heuristic rules overcome the problem of identifying a sufficiently strong induction hypothesis and enable an automated solution to the surveillance problem that satisfies the goal indefinitely. [328] Martin Magnusson and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Logical Agents for Language and Action. In 4th International Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference AIIDE 2008,2008. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-391-1. [327] Fredrik Heintz, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Bridging the Sense-Reasoning Gap: DyKnow - A Middleware Component for Knowledge Processing. In Martin Hulse and Manfred Hild, editors, IROS Workshop on Current Software Frameworks in Cognitive Robotics Integrating Different Computational Paradigms. Note: No proceedings, but CD Developing autonomous agents displaying rational and goal-directed behavior in a dynamic physical environment requires the integration of both sensing and reasoning components. Due to the different characteristics of these components there is a gap between sensing and reasoning. We believe that this gap can not be bridged in a single step with a single technique. Instead, it requires a more general approach to integrating components on many different levels of abstraction and organizing them in a structured and principled manner. In this paper we propose knowledge processing middleware as a systematic approach for organizing such processing. Desirable properties of such middleware are presented and motivated. We then go on to argue that a declarative streambased system is appropriate to provide the desired functionality. Finally, DyKnow, a concrete example of stream-based knowledge processing middleware that can be used to bridge the sense-reasoning gap, is presented. Different types of knowledge processes and components of the middleware are described and motivated in the context of a UAV traffic monitoring application. [326] Jonas Kvarnström, Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2008. A Temporal Logic-Based Planning and Execution Monitoring System. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-386-7, 978-1-57735-387-4. As no plan can cover all possible contingencies, the ability to detect failures during plan execution is crucial to the robustness of any autonomous system operating in a dynamic and uncertain environment. In this paper we present a general planning and execution monitoring system where formulas in an expressive temporal logic specify the desired behavior of a system and its environment. A unified domain description for planning and monitoring provides a solid shared declarative semantics permitting the monitoring of both global and operator-specific conditions. During plan execution, an execution monitor subsystem detects violations of monitor formulas in a timely manner using a progression algorithm on incrementally generated partial logical models. The system has been integrated on a fully deployed autonomous unmanned aircraft system. Extensive empirical testing has been performed using a combination of actual flight tests and hardware-in-the-loop simulations in a number of different mission scenarios. [325] Per-Magnus Olsson and Patrick Doherty. 2008. The Observer Algorithm For Visibility Approximation. In 10th Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, SCAI 2008, pages 3–11. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #173. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-58603-867-0, e-978-1-60750-335-4. Link to paper: http://books.google.se/books?id=eju691VM... We present a novel algorithm for visibility approximation that is substantially faster than ray casting based algorithms. The algorithm does not require extensive preprocessing or specialized hardware as most other algorithms do. We test this algorithm in several settings: rural, mountainous and urban areas, with different view ranges and grid cell sizes. By changing the size of the grid cells that the algorithm uses, it is possible to tailor the algorithm between speed and accuracy. [324] Rickard Karlsson, Thomas Schön, David Törnqvist, Gianpaolo Conte and Fredrik Gustafsson. 2008. Utilizing Model Structure for Efficient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping for a UAV Application. In Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Aerospace Conference, pages 1–10. ISBN: 978-1-4244-1487-1, 978-1-4244-1488-8. DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2008.4526442. Related report: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:... This contribution aims at unifying two recent trends in applied particle filtering (PF). The first trend is the major impact in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) applications, utilizing the FastSLAM algorithm. The second one is the implications of the marginalized particle filter (MPF) or the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) in positioning and tracking applications. Using the standard FastSLAM algorithm, only low-dimensional vehicle models are computationally feasible. In this work, an algorithm is introduced which merges FastSLAM and MPF, and the result is an algorithm for SLAM applications, where state vectors of higher dimensions can be used. Results using experimental data from a UAV (helicopter) are presented. The algorithm fuses measurements from on-board inertial sensors (accelerometer and gyro) and vision in order to solve the SLAM problem, i.e., enable navigation over a long period of time. [323] Mattias Krysander, Fredrik Heintz, Jacob Roll and Erik Frisk. 2008. Dynamic Test Selection for Reconfigurable Diagnosis. In Proceedings of the 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, pages 1066–1072. In series: IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Proceedings #??. IEEE. ISBN: 978-1-4244-3124-3, 978-1-4244-3123-6. DOI: 10.1109/CDC.2008.4738793. Detecting and isolating multiple faults is a computationally intense task which typically consists of computing a set of tests, and then computing the diagnoses based on the test results. This paper proposes a method to reduce the computational burden by only running the tests that are currently needed, and dynamically starting new tests when the need changes. A main contribution is a method to select tests such that the computational burden is reduced while maintaining the isolation performance of the diagnostic system. Key components in the approach are the test selection algorithm, the test initialization procedures, and a knowledge processing framework that supports the functionality needed. The approach is exemplified on a relatively small dynamical system, which still illustrates the complexity and possible computational gain with the proposed approach. [322] Aida Vitoria, Andrzej Szalas and Jan Maluszynski. 2008. Four-valued Extension of Rough Sets. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology (RSKT), pages 106–114. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #5009. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-79720-3. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-79721-0_19. Rough set approximations of Pawlak [15] are sometimes generalized by using similarities between objects rather than elementary sets. In practical applications, both knowledge about properties of objects and knowledge of similarity between objects can be incomplete and inconsistent. The aim of this paper is to define set approximations when all sets, and their approximations, as well as similarity relations are four-valued. A set is four-valued in the sense that its membership function can have one of the four logical values: unknown (u), false (f), inconsistent (i), or true (t). To this end, a new implication operator and set-theoretical operations on four-valued sets, such as set containment, are introduced. Several properties of lower and upper approximations of four-valued sets are also presented. [321] Jan Maluszynski, Aida Vitoria and Andrzej Szalas. 2008. Paraconsistent Logic Programs with Four-valued Rough Sets. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Rough Sets and Current Trends in Computing (RSCTC). In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #5306. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-88423-1. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-88425-5_5. This paper presents a language for defining four-valued rough sets and to reason about them. Our framework brings together two major fields: rough sets and paraconsistent logic programming. On the one hand it provides a paraconsistent approach, based on four-valued rough sets, for integrating knowledge from different sources and reasoning in the presence of inconsistencies. On the other hand, it also caters for a specific type of uncertainty that originates from the fact that an agent may perceive different objects of the universe as being indiscernible. This paper extends the ideas presented in [9]. Our language allows the user to define similarity relations and use the approximations induced by them in the definition of other four-valued sets. A positive aspect is that it allows users to tune the level of uncertainty or the source of uncertainty that best suits applications. [320] Rickard Karlsson, Thomas Schön, David Törnqvist, Gianpaolo Conte and Fredrik Gustafsson. 2008. Utilizing Model Structure for Efficient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping for a UAV Application. In Proceedings of Reglermöte 2008, pages 313–322. Related report: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:... This contribution aims at unifying two recent trends in applied particle filtering (PF). The first trend is the major impact in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) applications, utilizing the FastSLAM algorithm. Thesecond one is the implications of the marginalized particle filter (MPF) or the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) in positioning and tracking applications. Using the standard FastSLAM algorithm, only low-dimensional vehicle modelsare computationally feasible. In this work, an algorithm is introduced which merges FastSLAM and MPF, and the result is an algorithm for SLAM applications, where state vectors of higher dimensions can be used. Results using experimental data from a UAV (helicopter) are presented. The algorithmfuses measurements from on-board inertial sensors (accelerometer and gyro) and vision in order to solve the SLAM problem, i.e., enable navigation over a long period of time. [319] Fredrik Heintz, Mattias Krysander, Jacob Roll and Erik Frisk. 2008. FlexDx: A Reconfigurable Diagnosis Framework. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX). Detecting and isolating multiple faults is a computationally intense task which typically consists of computing a set of tests, and then computing the diagnoses based on the test results. This paper describes FlexDx, a reconfigurable diagnosis framework which reduces the computational burden by only running the tests that are currently needed. The method selects tests such that the isolation performance of the diagnostic system is maintained. Special attention is given to the practical issues introduced by a reconfigurable diagnosis framework such as FlexDx. For example, tests are added and removed dynamically, tests are partially performed on historic data, and synchronous and asynchronous processing are combined. To handle these issues FlexDx uses DyKnow, a stream-based knowledge processing middleware framework. The approach is exemplified on a relatively small dynamical system, which still illustrates the computational gain with the proposed approach. [318] Per-Magnus Olsson. 2008. Practical Pathfinding in Dynamic Environments. In Steve Rabin, editor, AI Game Programming Wisdom 4. Charles River. ISBN: 978-1-58450-523-5, 158-450-523-0. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/bib/11222031 link: http://www.amazon.com/AI-Game-Programmin... Welcome to the latest volume of AI Game Programming Wisdom! AI Game Programming Wisdom 4 includes a collection of more than 50 new articles featuring cutting-edge techniques, algorithms, and architectures written by industry professionals for use in commercial game development. Organized into 7 sections, this comprehensive volume explores every important aspect of AI programming to help you develop and expand your own personal AI toolbox. You'll find ready-to-use ideas, algorithms, and code in all key AI areas including general wisdom, scripting and dialogue, movement and pathfinding, architecture, tactics and planning, genre specific, and learning and adaptation. New to this volume are articles on recent advances in realistic agent, squad, and vehicle movement, as well as dynamically changing terrain, as exemplified in such popular games as Company of Heroes.You'll also find information on planning as a key game architecture, as well as important new advances in learning algorithms and player modeling. AI Game Programming Wisdom 4 features coverage of multiprocessor architectures, Bayesian networks, planning architectures, conversational AI, reinforcement learning, and player modeling.These valuable and innovative insights and issues offer the possibility of new game AI experiences and will undoubtedly contribute to taking the games of tomorrow to the next level. [317] Piotr Rudol, Mariusz Wzorek, Gianpaolo Conte and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Micro unmanned aerial vehicle visual servoing for cooperative indoor exploration. In Proceedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conference. In series: Aerospace Conference Proceedings #2008. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-1487-1. DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2008.4526558. Recent advances in the field of micro unmanned aerial vehicles (MAVs) make flying robots of small dimensions suitable platforms for performing advanced indoor missions. In order to achieve autonomous indoor flight a pose estimation technique is necessary. This paper presents a complete system which incorporates a vision-based pose estimation method to allow a MAV to navigate in indoor environments in cooperation with a ground robot. The pose estimation technique uses a lightweight light emitting diode (LED) cube structure as a pattern attached to a MAV. The pattern is observed by a ground robot's camera which provides the flying robot with the estimate of its pose. The system is not confined to a single location and allows for cooperative exploration of unknown environments. It is suitable for performing missions of a search and rescue nature where a MAV extends the range of sensors of the ground robot. The performance of the pose estimation technique and the complete system is presented and experimental flights of a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) MAV are described. [316] Fredrik Heintz, Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2008. Knowledge Processing Middleware. In S. Carpin, I. Noda, E. Pagello, M. Reggiani and O. von Stryk, editors, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR), pages 147–158. In series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #5325. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-89075-1. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-89076-8_17. Developing autonomous agents displaying rational and goal-directed behavior in a dynamic physical environment requires the integration of a great number of separate deliberative and reactive functionalities. This integration must be built on top of a solid foundation of data, information and knowledge having numerous origins, including quantitative sensors and qualitative knowledge databases. Processing is generally required on many levels of abstraction and includes refinement and fusion of noisy sensor data and symbolic reasoning. We propose the use of knowledge processing middleware as a systematic approach for organizing such processing. Desirable properties of such middleware are presented and motivated. We then argue that a declarative stream-based system is appropriate to provide the desired functionality. Different types of knowledge processes and components of the middleware are described and motivated in the context of a UAV traffic monitoring application. Finally DyKnow, a concrete example of stream-based knowledge processing middleware, is briefly described. [315] Oleg Burdakov, Kaj Holmberg and Per-Magnus Olsson. 2008. A Dual Ascent Method for the Hop-constrained Shortest Path with Application to Positioning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Technical Report. In series: Report / Department of Mathematics, Universitetet i Linköping, Tekniska högskolan #2008:7. Linköping University Electronic Press. 30 pages. We study the problem of positioning unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to maintain an unobstructed flow of communication from a surveying UAV to some base station through the use of multiple relay UAVs. This problem can be modeled as a hopconstrained shortest path problem in a large visibility graph. We propose a dual ascent method for solving this problem, optionally within a branch-and-bound framework. Computational tests show that realistic problems can be solved in a reasonably short time, and that the proposed method is faster than the classical dynamic programming approach. [314] Per Nyblom. 2008. Dynamic Abstraction for Interleaved Task Planning and Execution. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1363. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 94 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7393-905-8. Note: Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2008:21. It is often beneficial for an autonomous agent that operates in a complex environment to make use of different types of mathematical models to keep track of unobservable parts of the world or to perform prediction, planning and other types of reasoning. Since a model is always a simplification of something else, there always exists a tradeoff between the model’s accuracy and feasibility when it is used within a certain application due to the limited available computational resources. Currently, this tradeoff is to a large extent balanced by humans for model construction in general and for autonomous agents in particular. This thesis investigates different solutions where such agents are more responsible for balancing the tradeoff for models themselves in the context of interleaved task planning and plan execution. The necessary components for an autonomous agent that performs its abstractions and constructs planning models dynamically during task planning and execution are investigated and a method called DARE is developed that is a template for handling the possible situations that can occur such as the rise of unsuitable abstractions and need for dynamic construction of abstraction levels. Implementations of DARE are presented in two case studies where both a fully and partially observable stochastic domain are used, motivated by research with Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The case studies also demonstrate possible ways to perform dynamic abstraction and problem model construction in practice. [313] Anders Lund, Peter Andersson, J. Eriksson, J. Hallin, T. Johansson, R. Jonsson, H. Löfgren, C. Paulin and A. Tell. 2008. Automatic fitting procedures for EPR spectra of disordered systems: matrix diagonalization and perturbation methods applied to fluorocarbon radicals. Spectrochimica Acta Part A - Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy, 69(5):1294–1300. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.saa.2007.09.040. Note: Original publication: A. Lund, P. Andersson, J. Eriksson, J. Hallin, T. Johansson, R. Jonsson, H. Löfgren, C. Paulin and A. Tell, Automatic fitting procedures for EPR spectra of disordered systems: matrix diagonalization and perturbation methods applied to fluorocarbon radicals, 2008, Spectrochimica Acta Part A, (69), 5, 1294-1300. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.saa.2007.09.040. Copyright: Elsevier B.V., http://www.elsevier.com/ Two types of automatic fitting procedures for EPR spectra of disordered systems have been developed, one based on matrix diagonalisation of a general spin Hamiltonian, the other on 2nd order perturbation theory. The first program is based on a previous Fortran code complemented with a newly written interface in Java to provide user-friendly in- and output. The second is intended for the special case of free radicals with several relatively weakly interacting nuclei, in which case the general method becomes slow. A least squares’ fitting procedure utilizing analytical or numerical derivatives of the theoretically calculated spectrum with respect to the g-and hyperfine structure (hfs) tensors was used to refine those parameters in both cases. ‘Rigid limit’ ESR spectra from radicals in organic matrices and in polymers, previously studied experimentally at low temperature, were analysed by both methods. Fluoro-carbon anion radicals could be simulated, quite accurately with the exact method, whereas automatic fitting on e.g. the c-C4F8- anion radical is only feasible with the 2nd order approximative treatment. Initial values for the 19F hfs tensors estimated by DFT calculations were quite close to the final. For neutral radicals of the type XCF2CF2• the refinement of the hfs tensors by the exact method worked better than the approximate. The reasons are discussed. The ability of the fitting procedures to recover the correct magnetic parameters of disordered systems was investigated by fittings to synthetic spectra with known hfs tensors. The exact and the approximate methods are concluded to be complementary, one being general, but limited to relatively small systems, the other being a special treatment, suited for S=½ systems with several moderately large hfs. [312] Heike Joe Steinhauer. 2008. A Representation Scheme for Description and Reconstruction of Object Configurations Based on Qualitative Relations. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #1204. Linköping University Electronic Press. 178 pages. ISBN: 978-91-7393-823-5. One reason Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR) is becoming increasingly important to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the need for a smooth ‘human-like’ communication between autonomous agents and people. The selected, yet general, task motivating the work presented here is the scenario of an object configuration that has to be described by an observer on the ground using only relational object positions. The description provided should enable a second agent to create a map-like picture of the described configuration in order to recognize the configuration on a representation from the survey perspective, for instance on a geographic map or in the landscape itself while observing it from an aerial vehicle. Either agent might be an autonomous system or a person. Therefore, the particular focus of this work lies on the necessity to develop description and reconstruction methods that are cognitively easy to apply for a person.This thesis presents the representation scheme QuaDRO (Qualitative Description and Reconstruction of Object configurations). Its main contributions are a specification and qualitative classification of information available from different local viewpoints into nine qualitative equivalence classes. This classification allows the preservation of information needed for reconstruction nto a global frame of reference. The reconstruction takes place in an underlying qualitative grid with adjustable granularity. A novel approach for representing objects of eight different orientations by two different frames of reference is used. A substantial contribution to alleviate the reconstruction process is that new objects can be inserted anywhere within the reconstruction without the need for backtracking or rereconstructing. In addition, an approach to reconstruct configurations from underspecified descriptions using conceptual neighbourhood-based reasoning and coarse object relations is presented. 2007 [311] Simone Duranti and Gianpaolo Conte. 2007. In-flight Identification of the Augmented Flight Dynamics of the Rmax Unmanned Helicopter. In 17th IFAC Symposium on Automatic Control in Aerospace. International Federation of Automatic Control. DOI: 10.3182/20070625-5-FR-2916.00038. The flight dynamics of the Yamaha RMAX unmanned helicopter has been investigated, and mapped into a six degrees of freedom mathematical model. The model has been obtained by a combined black-box system identification technique and a classic model-based parameter identification approach. In particular, the closed-loop behaviour of the built-in attitude control system has been studied, to support the decision whether to keep it as inner stabilization loop or to develop an own stability augmentation system. The flight test method and the test instrumentation are described in detail; some samples of the flight test data are compared to the model outputs as validation, and an overall assessment of the built-in stabilization system is supplied. [310] Barbara Dunin-Keplicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2007. Towards Approximate BGI Systems. In Proceedings of the 5th International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (CEEMAS), pages 277–287. In series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #4696. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. ISBN: 9783540752530. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-75254-7_28. This paper focuses on modelling perception and vague concepts in the context of multiagent Bgi (Beliefs, Goals and Intentions) systems. The starting point is the multimodal formalization of such systems. Then we make a shift from Kripke structures to similarity structures, allowing us to model perception and vagueness in an uniform way, “compatible” with the multimodal approach. As a result we introduce and discuss approximate B gi systems, which can also be viewed as a way to implement multimodal specifications of Bgi systems in the context of perception. [309] Thomas Lemaire, Cyrille Berger, Il-Kyun Jung and Simon Lacroix. 2007. Vision-Based SLAM: Stereo and Monocular Approaches. International Journal of Computer Vision, 74(3):343–364. Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI: 10.1007/s11263-007-0042-3. Building a spatially consistent model is a key functionality to endow a mobile robot with autonomy. Without an initial map or an absolute localization means, it requires to concurrently solve the localization and mapping problems. For this purpose, vision is a powerful sensor, because it provides data from which stable features can be extracted and matched as the robot moves. But it does not directly provide 3D information, which is a difficulty for estimating the geometry of the environment. This article presents two approaches to the SLAM problem using vision: one with stereovision, and one with monocular images. Both approaches rely on a robust interest point matching algorithm that works in very diverse environments. The stereovision based approach is a classic SLAM implementation, whereas the monocular approach introduces a new way to initialize landmarks. Both approaches are analyzed and compared with extensive experimental results, with a rover and a blimp. [308] Christian Dornhege and Alexander Kleiner. 2007. Fully Autonomous Planning and Obstacle Negotiation on Rough Terrain Using Behavior Maps. In In Video Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 2561–2562. ISBN: 978-1-4244-0912-9. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2007.4399131. To autonomously navigate on rough terrain is a challenging problem for mobile robots, requiring the ability to decide whether parts of the environment can be traversed or have to be bypassed, which is commonly known as Obstacle Negotiation (ON). In this paper, we introduce a planning framework that extends ON to the general case, where different types of terrain classes directly map to specific robot skills, such as climbing stairs and ramps. This extension is based on a new concept called behavior maps, which is utilized for the planning and execution of complex skills. Behavior maps are directly generated from elevation maps, i.e. two-dimensional grids storing in each cell the corresponding height of the terrain surface, and a set of skill descriptions. Results from extensive experiments are presented, showing that the method enables the robot to explore successfully rough terrain in real-time, while selecting the optimal trajectory in terms of costs for navigation and skill execution. [307] Holger Kenn and Alexander Kleiner. 2007. Towards the Integration of Real-Time Real-World Data in Urban Search and Rescue Simulation. In MobileResponse, pages 106–115. The coordinated reaction to a large-scale disaster is a challenging research problem. The Robocup rescue simulation league addresses this research problem but is currently lacking an interface to real-world real-time data to test the validity of both simulation and simulated reactions. In this paper, we describe a wearable-computing-based real world interface to the Robocup Resuce simulation software and provide some updated results of preliminary evaluations. [306] Stephen Balakirsky, Stefano Carpin, Alexander Kleiner, Michael Lewis, Arnoud Visser, Jijun Wang and Vittorio Amos Ziparo. 2007. Towards Heterogeneous Robot Teams for Disaster Mitigation: Results and Performance Metrics from Robocup Rescue. Journal of Field Robotics, 24(11):943–967. DOI: 10.1002/rob.20212. Urban Search And Rescue is a growing area of robotic research. The RoboCup Federation has recognized this, and has created the new Virtual Robots competition to complement its existing physical robot and agent competitions. In order to successfully compete in this competition, teams need to field multi-robot solutions that cooperatively explore and map an environment while searching for victims. This paper presents the results of the first annual RoboCup Rescue Virtual competition. It provides details on the metrics used to judge the contestants as well as summaries of the algorithms used by the top four teams. This allows readers to compare and contrast these effective approaches. Furthermore, the simulation engine itself is examined and real-world validation results on the engine and algorithms are offered. [305] Alexander Kleiner and Christian Dornhege. 2007. Real-time Localization and Elevation Mapping within Urban Search and Rescue Scenarios. Journal of Field Robotics, 24(8-9):723–745. Wiley. DOI: 10.1002/rob.20208. Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) is a time critical task. Rescue teams have to explore a large terrain within a short amount of time in order to locate survivors after a disaster. One goal in Rescue Robotics is to have a team of heterogeneous robots that explore autonomously, or partially guided by an incident commander, the disaster area. Their task is to jointly create a map of the terrain and to register victim locations, which can further be utilized by human task forces for rescue. Basically, the robots have to solve autonomously in real-time the problem of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), consisting of a continuous state estimation problem and a discrete data association problem. Extraordinary circumstances after a real disaster make it very hard to apply common techniques. Many of these have been developed under strong assumptions, for example, they require polygonal structures, such as typically found in office-like environments. Furthermore, most techniques are not deployable in real-time. In this paper we propose real-time solutions for localization and mapping, which all have been extensively evaluated within the test arenas of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We specifically deal with the problems of vision-based pose tracking on tracked vehicles, the building of globally consistent maps based on a network of RFID tags, and the building of elevation maps from readings of a tilted Laser Range Finder (LRF). Our results show that these methods lead under modest computational requirements to good results within the utilized testing arenas. [304] Christian Dornhege and Alexander Kleiner. 2007. Behavior Maps for Online Planning of Obstacle Negotiation and Climbing on Rough Terrain. In In Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 3005–3011. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-0912-9. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2007.4399107. To autonomously navigate on rough terrain is a challenging problem for mobile robots, requiring the ability to decide whether parts of the environment can be traversed or have to be bypassed, which is commonly known as Obstacle Negotiation (ON). In this paper, we introduce a planning framework that extends ON to the general case, where different types of terrain classes directly map to specific robot skills, such as climbing stairs and ramps. This extension is based on a new concept called behavior maps, which is utilized for the planning and execution of complex skills. Behavior maps are directly generated from elevation maps, i.e. two-dimensional grids storing in each cell the corresponding height of the terrain surface, and a set of skill descriptions. Results from extensive experiments are presented, showing that the method enables the robot to explore successfully rough terrain in real-time, while selecting the optimal trajectory in terms of costs for navigation and skill execution. [303] Alexander Kleiner, C. Dornhege and D. Sun. 2007. Mapping Disaster Areas Jointly: RFID-Coordinated SLAM by Humans and Robots. In IEEE Int. Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), pages 1–6. IEEE. ISBN: 978-1-4244-1569-4. DOI: 10.1109/SSRR.2007.4381263. We consider the problem of jointly performing SLAM by humans and robots in Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) scenarios. In this context, SLAM is a challenging task. First, places are hardly re-observable by vision techniques since visibility might be affected by smoke and fire. Second, loop-closure is cumbersome due to the fact that firemen will intentionally try to avoid performing loops when facing the reality of emergency response, e.g. while they are searching for victims. Furthermore, there might be places that are only accessible to robots, making it necessary to integrate humans and robots into one team for mapping the area after a disaster. In this paper, we introduce a method for jointly correcting individual trajectories of humans and robots by utilizing RFID technology for data association. Hereby the poses of humans and robots are tracked by a PDR (Pedestrian Dead Reckoning), and slippage sensitive odometry, respectively. We conducted extensive experiments with a team of humans, and a human-robot team within a semi-outdoor environment. Results from these experiments show that the introduced method allows to improve single trajectories based on the joint graph, even if they do not contain any loop. [302] Alexander Kleiner and R. Kümmerle. 2007. Genetic MRF Model Optimization for Real-Time Victim Detection in Search and Rescue. In IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 3025–3030. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-0912-9. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2007.4399006. One primary goal in rescue robotics is to deploy a team of robots for coordinated victim search after a disaster. This requires robots to perform subtasks, such as victim detection, in real-time. Human detection by computationally cheap techniques, such as color thresholding, turn out to produce a large number of false-positives. Markov Random Fields (MRFs) can be utilized to combine the local evidence of multiple weak classifiers in order to improve the detection rate. However, inference in MRFs is computational expensive. In this paper we present a novel approach for the genetic optimizing of the building process of MRF models. The genetic algorithm determines offline relevant neighborhood relations with respect to the data, which are then utilized for generating efficient MRF models from video streams during runtime. Experimental results clearly show that compared to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based classifier, the optimized MRF models significantly reduce the false-positive rate. Furthermore, the optimized models turned out to be up to five times faster then the non-optimized ones at nearly the same detection rate. [301] Alexander Kleiner and D. Sun. 2007. Decentralized SLAM for Pedestrians without direct Communication. In In Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 1461–1466. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-1-4244-0912-9. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2007.4399013. We consider the problem of Decentralized Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (DSLAM) for pedestrians in the context of Urban Search And Rescue (USAR). In this context, DSLAM is a challenging task. First, data exchange fails due to cut off communication links. Second, loop-closure is cumbersome due to the fact that fireman will intentionally try to avoid performing loops, when facing the reality of emergency response, e.g. while they are searching for victims. In this paper, we introduce a solution to this problem based on the non-selfish sharing of information between pedestrians for loop-closure. We introduce a novel DSLAM method which is based on data exchange and association via RFID technology, not requiring any radio communication. The approach has been evaluated within both outdoor and semi-indoor environments. The presented results show that sharing information between single pedestrians allows to optimize globally their individual paths, even if they are not able to communicate directly. [300] V. A. Ziparo, Alexander Kleiner, A. Farinelli, L. Marchetti and D. Nardi. 2007. Cooperative Exploration for USAR Robots with Indirect Communication. In Proc. of 6th IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV). To coordinate a team of robots for exploration is a challenging problem, particularly in unstructured areas, as for example post-disaster scenarios where direct communication is severely constrained. Furthermore, conventional methods of SLAM, e.g. those performing data association based on visual features, are doomed to fail due to bad visibility caused by smoke and fire. We use indirect communication (based on RFIDs), to share knowledge and use a gradient-like local search to direct robots towards interesting areas. To share a common frame of reference among robots we use a feature based SLAM approach (where features are RFIDs). The approach has been evaluated on a 3D simulation based on USARSim. [299] V. A. Ziparo, Alexander Kleiner, B. Nebel and D. Nardi. 2007. RFID-Based Exploration for Large Robot Teams. In Proc. of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 4606–4613. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.2007.364189. To coordinate a team of robots for exploration is a challenging problem, particularly in large areas as for example the devastated area after a disaster. This problem can generally be decomposed into task assignment and multi-robot path planning. In this paper, we address both problems jointly. This is possible because we reduce significantly the size of the search space by utilizing RFID tags as coordination points. The exploration approach consists of two parts: a stand-alone distributed local search and a global monitoring process which can be used to restart the local search in more convenient locations. Our results show that the local exploration works for large robot teams, particularly if there are limited computational resources. Experiments with the global approach showed that the number of conflicts can be reduced, and that the global coordination mechanism increases significantly the explored area. [298] Karolina Eliasson. 2007. Case-Based Techniques Used for Dialogue Understanding and Planning in a Human-Robot Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. [297] Per Nyblom. 2007. Dynamic Planning Problem Generation in a UAV Domain. In 6th IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (2007) Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, Volume# 6 | Part# 1, pages 258–263. In series: IFAC Proceedings series #??. Elsevier. ISBN: 978-3-902661-65-4. DOI: 10.3182/20070903-3-FR-2921.00045. One of the most successful methods for planning in large partially observable stochastic domains is depth-limited forward search from the current belief state together with a utility estimation. However, when the environment is continuous and the number of possible actions is practically infinite, then abstractions have to be made before any forward search planning can be performed. The paper presents a method to dynamically generate such planning problem abstractions for a domain that is inspired by our research with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The planning problems are created by first stating the selection of points to fly to as an optimization problem. When the points have been selected, a set of possible paths between them are then created with a pathplanner and then forward search in the belief state space is applied. The method has been implemented and tested in simulation and the experiments show the importance of modelling both the dynamics of the environment and the limited computational resources of the architecture when searching for suitable parameters in the planning problem formulation procedure. [296] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2007. Communication between agents with heterogeneous perceptual capabilities. Information Fusion, 8(1):56–69. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.inffus.2005.05.006. In real world applications robots and software agents often have to be equipped with higher level cognitive functions that enable them to reason, act and perceive in changing, incompletely known and unpredictable environments. One of the major tasks in such circumstances is to fuse information from various data sources. There are many levels of information fusion, ranging from the fusing of low level sensor signals to the fusing of high level, complex knowledge structures. In a dynamically changing environment even a single agent may have varying abilities to perceive its environment which are dependent on particular conditions. The situation becomes even more complex when different agents have different perceptual capabilities and need to communicate with each other. In this paper, we propose a framework that provides agents with the ability to fuse both low and high level approximate knowledge in the context of dynamically changing environments while taking account of heterogeneous and contextually limited perceptual capabilities. To model limitations on an agent's perceptual capabilities we introduce the idea of partial tolerance spaces. We assume that each agent has one or more approximate databases where approximate relations are represented using lower and upper approximations on sets. Approximate relations are generalizations of rough sets. It is shown how sensory and other limitations can be taken into account when constructing and querying approximate databases for each respective agent. Complex relations inherit the approximativeness of primitive relations used in their definitions. Agents then query these databases and receive answers through the filters of their perceptual limitations as represented by (partial) tolerance spaces and approximate queries. The techniques used are all tractable. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. [295] D.M. Gabbay and Andrzej Szalas. 2007. Second-order quantifier elimination in higher-order contexts with applications to the semantical analysis of conditionals. Studia Logica: An International Journal for Symbolic Logic, 87(1):37–50. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s11225-007-9075-4. Second-order quantifier elimination in the context of classical logic emerged as a powerful technique in many applications, including the correspondence theory, relational databases, deductive and knowledge databases, knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning and approximate reasoning. In the current paper we first generalize the result of Nonnengart and Szalas [17] by allowing second-order variables to appear within higher-order contexts. Then we focus on a semantical analysis of conditionals, using the introduced technique and Gabbay's semantics provided in [10] and substantially using a third-order accessibility relation. The analysis is done via finding correspondences between axioms involving conditionals and properties of the underlying third-order relation. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. [294] Patrick Doherty and Andrzej Szalas. 2007. A correspondence framework between three-valued logics and similarity-based approximate reasoning. Fundamenta Informaticae, 75(1-4):179–193. IOS Press. This paper focuses on approximate reasoning based on the use of similarity spaces. Similarity spaces and the approximated relations induced by them are a generalization of the rough set-based approximations of Pawlak [17, 18]. Similarity spaces are used to define neighborhoods around individuals and these in turn are used to define approximate sets and relations. In any of the approaches, one would like to embed such relations in an appropriate logic which can be used as a reasoning engine for specific applications with specific constraints. We propose a framework which permits a formal study of the relationship between approximate relations, similarity spaces and three-valued logics. Using ideas from correspondence theory for modal logics and constraints on an accessibility relation, we develop an analogous framework for three-valued logics and constraints on similarity relations. In this manner, we can provide a tool which helps in determining the proper three-valued logical reasoning engine to use for different classes of approximate relations generated via specific types of similarity spaces. Additionally, by choosing a three-valued logic first, the framework determines what constraints would be required on a similarity relation and the approximate relations induced by it. Such information would guide the generation of approximate relations for specific applications. [293] David Lawrence, Erik Sandewall and Peter Berkesand. 2007. A Swedish Journal Publication Service. In Högskolor och samhälle i samverkan (HSS). In 2002, Linköping University Electronic Press began development of a journal article reviewing support system (JARSS) as a tool for Editors of electronic journals. The system-s database contains submitted articles, abstracts and other secondary information, reviews, and e-mail communication for the purpose of submission, reviewing and final acceptance. The interface maintains a log of all events pertaining to the article and the associated status changes. The successive status options of an article (received, under review, conditional accept, etc.) correspond to the editorial workflow. JARRS has been used since its inception to run the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), an Elsevier publication. In essence a service is offered to take care of the technical aspects of journal publication, allowing editors more time to solicit papers of high quality. [292] Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2007. A framework for reconfigurable path planning for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles. Manuscript (preprint). [291] Simone Duranti, Gianpaolo Conte, David Lundström, Piotr Rudol, Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2007. LinkMAV, a prototype rotary wing micro aerial vehicle. In 17th IFAC Symposium on Automatic Control in Aerospace,2007. Elsevier. [290] Patrick Doherty, Barbara Dunin-Keplicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2007. Dynamics of approximate information fusion. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Rough Sets and Emerging Intelligent Systems Paradigms (RSEISP), pages 668–677. In series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #4585. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. ISBN: 978-3-540-73450-5. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-73451-2_70. The multi-agent system paradigm has proven to be a useful means of abstraction when considering distributed systems with interacting components. It is often the case that each component may be viewed as an intelligent agent with specific and often limited perceptual capabilities. It is also the case that these agent components may be used as information sources and such sources may be aggregated to provide global information about particular states, situations or activities in the embedding environment. This paper investigates a framework for information fusion based on the use of generalizations of rough set theory and the use of dynamic logic as a basis for aggregating similarity relations among objects where the similarity relations represent individual agents perceptual capabilities or limitations. As an added benefit, it is shown how this idea may also be integrated into description logics. [289] Patrick Doherty and John-Jules Meyer. 2007. Towards a delegation framework for aerial robotic mission scenarios. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA), pages 5–26. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. ISBN: 978-3-540-75118-2. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-75119-9_2. The concept of delegation is central to an understanding of the interactions between agents in cooperative agent problem-solving contexts. In fact, the concept of delegation offers a means for studying the formal connections between mixed-initiative problem-solving, adjustable autonomy and cooperative agent goal achievement. In this paper, we present an exploratory study of the delegation concept grounded in the context of a relatively complex multi-platform Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) catastrophe assistance scenario, where UAVs must cooperatively scan a geographic region for injured persons. We first present the scenario as a case study, showing how it is instantiated with actual UAV platforms and what a real mission implies in terms of pragmatics. We then take a step back and present a formal theory of delegation based on the use of 2APL and KARO. We then return to the scenario and use the new theory of delegation to formally specify many of the communicative interactions related to delegation used in achieving the goal of cooperative UAV scanning. The development of theory and its empirical evaluation is integrated from the start in order to ensure that the gap between this evolving theory of delegation and its actual use remains closely synchronized as the research progresses. The results presented here may be considered a first iteration of the theory and ideas. [288] Patrick Doherty and Piotr Rudol. 2007. A UAV search and rescue scenario with human body detection and geolocalization. In Proceedings of the 20th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. ISBN: 978-3-540-76926-2. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) which can operate autonomously in dynamic and complex operational environments is becoming increasingly more common. The UAVTech Lab, is pursuing a long term research endeavour related to the development of future aviation systems which try and push the envelope in terms of using and integrating high-level deliberative or AI functionality with traditional reactive and control components in autonomous UAV systems. In order to carry on such research, one requires challenging mission scenarios which force such integration and development. In this paper, one of these challenging emergency services mission scenarios is presented. It involves search and rescue for injured civilians by UAVs. In leg I of the mission, UAVs scan designated areas and try to identify injured civilians. In leg II of the mission, an attempt is made to deliver medical and other supplies to identified victims. We show how far we have come in implementing and executing such a challenging mission in realistic urban scenarios. [287] Luis Mejias, Pascual Campoy, Iván F. Mondragón and Patrick Doherty. 2007. Stereo visual system for autonomous air vehicle navigation. In 6th IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (2007) Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, Volume# 6 | Part# 1, pages 203–208. In series: IFAC Proceedings series #??. Elsevier. ISBN: 978-3-902661-65-4. DOI: 10.3182/20070903-3-FR-2921.00037. We present a system to estimate the altitude and motion of an aerial vehicle using a stereo visual system. The system has been initially tested on a ground robot and the novelty lays on its application and robustness validation in an UAV, where vibrations and rapid environmental changes take place. The two main functionalities are height estimation and visual odometry. The system first detects and tracks salient points in the scene. Depth to the plane containing the features is calculated matching features between left and right images then using the disparity principle. Motion is recovered tracking pixels from one frame to the next one finding its visual displacement and resolving camera rotation and translation by a least-square method. We present results from different experimental trials on the two platforms comparing and discussing the results regarding the trajectories calculated by the visual odometry and the onboard helicopter state estimation. [286] Fredrik Heintz, Piotr Rudol and Patrick Doherty. 2007. From Images to Traffic Behavior - A UAV Tracking and Monitoring Application. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION). IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 978-0-662-45804-3, 978-0-662-47830-0. DOI: 10.1109/ICIF.2007.4408103. Link: http://www.ida.liu.se/~frehe/publication... An implemented system for achieving high level situation awareness about traffic situations in an urban area is described. It takes as input sequences of color and thermal images which are used to construct and maintain qualitative object structures and to recognize the traffic behavior of the tracked vehicles in real time. The system is tested both in simulation and on data collected during test flights. To facilitate the signal to symbol transformation and the easy integration of the streams of data from the sensors with the GIS and the chronicle recognition system, DyKnow, a stream-based knowledge processing middleware, is used. It handles the processing of streams, including the temporal aspects of merging and synchronizing streams, and provides suitable abstractions to allow high level reasoning and narrow the sense reasoning gap. [285] Jan Maluszynski, Andrzej Szalas and Aida Vitoria. 2007. A Four-Valued Logic for Rough Set-Like Approximate Reasoning. In James F. Peters, Andrzej Skowron, Ivo Düntsch, Jerzy Grzymala-Busse, Ewa Orlowska and Lech Polkowski, editors, Transactions on Rough Sets VI, pages 176–190. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #4374/2007. Springer. ISBN: 3-540-71198-8, 978-3-540-71198-8. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-71200-8_11. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/bib/11381912 Annotation The LNCS journal Transactions on Rough Sets is devoted to the entire spectrum of rough sets related issues, from logical and mathematical foundations, through all aspects of rough set theory and its applications, such as data mining, knowledge discovery, and intelligent information processing, to relations between rough sets and other approaches to uncertainty, vagueness, and incompleteness, such as fuzzy sets and theory of evidence. Volume VI of the Transactions on Rough Sets (TRS) commemorates the life and work of Zdzislaw Pawlak (1926-2006). His legacy is rich and varied. Prof. Pawlak's research contributions have had far-reaching implications inasmuch as his works are fundamental in establishing new perspectives for scientific research in a wide spectrum of fields. This volume of the TRS presents papers that reflect the profound influence of a number of research initiatives by Professor Pawlak. In particular, this volume introduces a number of new advances in the foundations and applications of artificial intelligence, engineering, logic, mathematics, and science. These advances have significant implications in a number of research areas such as the foundations of rough sets, approximate reasoning, bioinformatics, computational intelligence, cognitive science, data mining, information systems, intelligent systems, machine intelligence, and security. [284] Fredrik Heintz, Piotr Rudol and Patrick Doherty. 2007. Bridging the Sense-Reasoning Gap Using DyKnow: A Knowledge Processing Middleware Framework. In Joachim Hertzberg, Michael Beetz and Roman Englert, editors, Proceedings of the 30th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI), pages 460–463. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #4667. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-74564-8. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-74565-5_40. Link: http://www.ida.liu.se/~frehe/publication... To achieve complex missions an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operating in dynamic environments must have and maintain situational awareness. This can be achieved by continually gathering information from many sources, selecting the relevant information for current tasks, and deriving models about the environment and the UAV itself. It is often the case models suitable for traditional control, are not sufficient for deliberation. The need for more abstract models creates a sense-reasoning gap. This paper presents DyKnow, a knowledge processing middleware framework, and shows how it supports bridging the gap in a concrete UAV traffic monitoring application. In the example, sequences of color and thermal images are used to construct and maintain qualitative object structures. They model the parts of the environment necessary to recognize traffic behavior of tracked vehicles in real-time. The system has been implemented and tested in simulation and on data collected during flight tests. [283] Martin Magnusson and Patrick Doherty. 2007. Deductive Planning with Temporal Constraints. In Commonsense 2007, the 8th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning,2007. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-314-0. Link: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/commonsense07/paper... Temporal Action Logic is a well established logical formalism for reasoning about action and change using an explicit time representation that makes it suitable for applications that involve complex temporal reasoning. We take advantage of constraint satisfaction technology to facilitate such reasoning through temporal constraint networks. Extensions are introduced that make generation of action sequences possible, thus paving the road for interesting applications in deductive planning. The extended formalism is encoded as a logic program that is able to realize a least commitment strategy that generates partial order plans in the context of both qualitative and quantitative temporal constraints. [282] Björn Hägglund. 2007. A framework for designing constraint stores. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1302. Linköpings universitet. 118 pages. ISBN: 978-91-85715-70-1. A constraint solver based on concurrent search and propagation provides a well-defined component model for propagators by enforcing a strict two-level architecture. This makes it straightforward for third parties to invent, implement and deploy new kinds of propagators. The most critical components of such solvers are the constraint stores through which propagators communicate with each other. Introducing stores supporting new kinds of stored constraints can potentially increase the solving power by several orders of magnitude. This thesis presents a theoretical framework for designing stores achieving this without loss of propagator interoperability. [281] Gianpaolo Conte. 2007. Navigation Functionalities for an Autonomous UAV Helicopter. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1307. Linköping University Electronic Press. 74 pages. ISBN: 978-91-85715-35-0. This thesis was written during the WITAS UAV Project where one of the goals has been the development of a software/hardware architecture for an unmanned autonomous helicopter, in addition to autonomous functionalities required for complex mission scenarios. The algorithms developed here have been tested on an unmanned helicopter platform developed by Yamaha Motor Company called the RMAX. The character of the thesis is primarily experimental and it should be viewed as developing navigational functionality to support autonomous flight during complex real world mission scenarios. This task is multidisciplinary since it requires competence in aeronautics, computer science and electronics. The focus of the thesis has been on the development of a control method to enable the helicopter to follow 3D paths. Additionally, a helicopter simulation tool has been developed in order to test the control system before flight-tests. The thesis also presents an implementation and experimental evaluation of a sensor fusion technique based on a Kalman filter applied to a vision based autonomous landing problem. Extensive experimental flight-test results are presented. [280] Martin Magnusson. 2007. Deductive Planning and Composite Actions in Temporal Action Logic. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1329. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 85 pages. ISBN: 978-91-85895-93-9. Temporal Action Logic is a well established logical formalism for reasoning about action and change that has long been used as a formal specification language. Its first-order characterization and explicit time representation makes it a suitable target for automated theorem proving and the application of temporal constraint solvers. We introduce a translation from a subset of Temporal Action Logic to constraint logic programs that takes advantage of these characteristics to make the logic applicable, not just as a formal specification language, but in solving practical reasoning problems. Extensions are introduced that enable the generation of action sequences, thus paving the road for interesting applications in deductive planning. The use of qualitative temporal constraints makes it possible to follow a least commitment strategy and construct partially ordered plans. Furthermore, the logical language and logic program translation is extended with the notion of composite actions that can be used to formulate and execute scripted plans with conditional actions, non-deterministic choices, and loops. The resulting planner and reasoner is integrated with a graphical user interface in our autonomous helicopter research system and applied to logistics problems. Solution plans are synthesized together with monitoring constraints that trigger the generation of recovery actions in cases of execution failures. 2006 [279] Ewa Orlowska, Alberto Policriti and Andrzej Szalas. 2006. Algebraic and Relational Deductive Tools. Conference Proceedings. In series: Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics #??. Éditions Hermès-Lavoisier. Note: Special Issue [278] Alexander Kleiner, Christian Dornhege, Rainer Kümmerle, Michael Ruhnke, Bastian Steder, Bernhard Nebel, Patrick Doherty, Mariusz Wzorek, Piotr Rudol, Gianpaolo Conte, Simone Duranti and David Lundström. 2006. RoboCupRescue - Robot League Team RescueRobots Freiburg (Germany). In RoboCup 2006 (CDROM Proceedings), Team Description Paper, Rescue Robot League. Note: (1st place in the autonomy competition) This paper describes the approach of the RescueRobots Freiburg team, which is a team of students from the University of Freiburg that originates from the former CS Freiburg team (RoboCupSoccer) and the ResQ Freiburg team (RoboCupRescue Simulation). Furthermore we introduce linkMAV, a micro aerial vehicle platform. Our approach covers RFID-based SLAM and exploration, autonomous detection of relevant 3D structures, visual odometry, and autonomous victim identification. Furthermore, we introduce a custom made 3D Laser Range Finder (LRF) and a novel mechanism for the active distribution of RFID tags. [277] Alexander Kleiner, Nils Behrens and Holger Kenn. 2006. Wearable Computing Meets Multiagent Systems: A Real-World Interface for the RoboCupRescue Simulation Platform. In First International Workshop on Agent Technology for Disaster Management at AAMAS06, pages 116–123. One big challenge in disaster response is to get an overview over the degree of damage and to provide this information, together with optimized plans for rescue missions, back to teams in the field. Collapsing infrastructure, limited visibility due to smoke and dust, and overloaded communication lines make it nearly impossible for rescue teams to report the total situation consistently. This problem can only be solved by efficiently integrating data of many observers into a single consistent view. A Global Positioning System (GPS) device in conjunction with a communication device, and sensors or simple input methods for reporting observations, offer a realistic chance to solve the data integration problem. We propose preliminary results from a wearable computing device, acquiring disaster relevant data, such as locations of victims and blockades, and show the data integration into the RoboCupRescue Simulation platform, which is a benchmark for MAS within the RoboCup competitions. We show exemplarily how the data can consistently be integrated and how rescue missions can be optimized by solutions developed on the RoboCupRescue simulation platform. The preliminary results indicate that nowadays wearable computing technology combined with MAS technology can serve as a powerful tool for Urban Search and Rescue (USAR). [276] Christian Dornhege and Alexander Kleiner. 2006. Visual Odometry for Tracked Vehicles. In In Proc. of the IEEE Int. Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR). Localization and mapping on autonomous robots typically requires a good pose estimate, which is hard to acquire if the vehicle is tracked. In this paper we describe a solution to the pose estimation problem by utilizing a consumer-quality camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). The basic idea is to continuously track salient features with the KLT feature tracker over multiple images taken by the camera and to extract from the tracked features image vectors resulting from the robot’s motion. Each image vector is taken for a voting that best explains the robot’s motion. Image vectors vote according to a previously trained tile coding classificator that assigns to each possible image vector a translation probability. Our results show that the proposed single camera solution leads to sufficiently accurate pose estimates of the tracked vehicle. [275] Alexander Kleiner, J. Prediger and Bernhard Nebel. 2006. RFID Technology-based Exploration and SLAM for Search And Rescue. In Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 4054–4059. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 1-4244-0258-1. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2006.281867. Robot search and rescue is a time critical task, i.e. a large terrain has to be explored by multiple robots within a short amount of time. The efficiency of exploration depends mainly on the coordination between the robots and hence on the reliability of communication, which considerably suffers under the hostile conditions encountered after a disaster. Furthermore, rescue robots have to generate a map of the environment which has to be sufficiently accurate for reporting the locations of victims to human task forces. Basically, the robots have to solve autonomously in real-time the problem of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). This paper proposes a novel method for real-time exploration and SLAM based on RFID tags that are autonomously distributed in the environment. We utilized the algorithm of Lu and Milios for calculating globally consistent maps from detected RFID tags. Furthermore we show how RFID tags can be used for coordinating the exploration of multiple robots. Results from experiments conducted in the simulation and on a robot show that our approach allows the computationally efficient construction of a map within harsh environments, and coordinated exploration of a team of robots. [274] Alexander Kleiner and V. A. Ziparo. 2006. RoboCupRescue - Simulation League Team RescueRobots Freiburg (Germany). In RoboCup 2006 (CDROM Proceedings), Team Description Paper, Rescue Simulation League. Note: (1st place in the competition) This paper describes the approach of the RescueRobots Freiburg Virtual League team. Our simulated robots are based on the two real robot types Lurker, a robot capable of climbing stairs and random stepfield, and Zerg, a lightweight and agile robot, capable of autonomously distributing RFID tags. Our approach covers a novel method for RFID-Technology based SLAM and exploration, allowing the fast and efficient coordination of a team of robots. Furthermore we utilize Petri nets for team coordination. [273] Erik Sandewall. 2006. Systems - Opening up the process. Nature, ??(??):??–??. Nature Publishing Group. DOI: 10.1038/nature04994. n/a [272] Per Nyblom. 2006. Dynamic Abstraction for Hierarchical Problem Solving and Execution in Stochastic Dynamic Environments. In Loris Penserini, Pavlos Peppas, Anna Perini, editors, STAIRS 2006, pages 263–264. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #142. IOS Press. ISBN: 978-1-58603-645-4, e-978-1-60750-190-9. Link to publication: http://www.booksonline.iospress.nl/Conte... Most of today’s autonomous problem solving agents perform their task with the help of problem domain specifications that keep their abstractions fixed. Those abstractions are often selected by human users. We think that the approach with fixed-abstraction domain specifications is very inflexible because it does not allow the agent to focus its limited computational resources on what may be most relevant at the moment. We would like to build agents that dynamically find suitable abstractions depending on relevance for their current task and situation. This idea of dynamic abstraction has recently been considered an important research problem within the area of hierarchical reinforcement learning [1]. [271] Torsten Merz, Simone Duranti and Gianpaolo Conte. 2006. Autonomous landing of an unmanned helicopter based on vision and inertial sensing. In Marcelo H. Ang and Oussama Khatib, editors, Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, pages 343–352. In series: Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics #21. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-28816-9. DOI: 10.1007/11552246_33. Link to Ph.D. Thesis: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:... In this paper we propose an autonomous precision landing method for an unmanned helicopter based on an on-board visual navigation system consisting of a single pan-tilting camera, off-the-shelf computer hardware and inertial sensors. Compared to existing methods, the system doesn't depend on additional sensors (in particular not on GPS), offers a wide envelope of starting points for the autonomous approach, and is robust to different weather conditions. Helicopter position and attitude is estimated from images of a specially designed landing pad. We provide results from both simulations and flight tests, showing the performance of the vision system and the overall quality of the landing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2006. [270] Patrik Haslum. 2006. Improving heuristics through relaxed search - An analysis of TP4 and HSP*a in the 2004 planning competition. The journal of artificial intelligence research, 25(??):233–267. AAAI Press. DOI: 10.1613/jair.1885. The h(m) admissible heuristics for (sequential and temporal) regression planning are defined by a parameterized relaxation of the optimal cost function in the regression search space, where the parameter m offers a trade-off between the accuracy and computational cost of the heuristic. Existing methods for computing the h(m) heuristic require time exponential in m, limiting them to small values (m <= 2). The h(m) heuristic can also be viewed as the optimal cost function in a relaxation of the search space: this paper presents relaxed search, a method for computing this function partially by searching in the relaxed space. The relaxed search method, because it compute h(m) only partially, is computationally cheaper and therefore usable for higher values of m. The (complete) h(2) heuristic is combined with partial hm heuristics , for m = 3, ... computed by relaxed search, resulting in a more accurate heuristic. This use of the relaxed search method to improve on the h(2) heuristic is evaluated by comparing two optimal temporal planners: TP4, which does not use it, and HSP*(a), which uses it but is otherwise identical to TP4. The comparison is made on the domains used in the 2004 International Planning Competition, in which both planners participated. Relaxed search is found to be cost effective in some of these domains, but not all. Analysis reveals a characterization of the domains in which relaxed search can be expected to be cost effective, in terms of two measures on the original and relaxed search spaces. In the domains where relaxed search is cost effective, expanding small states is computationally cheaper than expanding large states and small states tend to have small successor states. [269] Klas Nordberg, Patrick Doherty, Per-Erik Forssén, Johan Wiklund and Per Andersson. 2006. A flexible runtime system for image processing in a distributed computational environment for an unmanned aerial vehicle. International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 20(5):763–780. DOI: 10.1142/S0218001406004867. A runtime system for implementation of image processing operations is presented. It is designed for working in a flexible and distributed environment related to the software architecture of a newly developed UAV system. The software architecture can be characterized at a coarse scale as a layered system, with a deliberative layer at the top, a reactive layer in the middle, and a processing layer at the bottom. At a finer scale each of the three levels is decomposed into sets of modules which communicate using CORBA, allowing system development and deployment on the UAV to be made in a highly flexible way. Image processing takes place in a dedicated module located in the process layer, and is the main focus of the paper. This module has been designed as a runtime system for data flow graphs, allowing various processing operations to be created online and on demand by the higher levels of the system. The runtime system is implemented in Java, which allows development and deployment to be made on a wide range of hardware/software configurations. Optimizations for particular hardware platforms have been made using Java's native interface. [268] Andrzej Szalas and Jerzy Tyszkiewicz. 2006. On the fixpoint theory of equality and its applications. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Relational Methods in Computer Science and 4th International Workshop on Applications of Kleene Algebra (RelMiCS/AKA), pages 388–401. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #4136. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/11828563_26. In the current paper we first show that the fixpoint theory of equality is decidable. The motivation behind considering this theory is that second-order quantifier elimination techniques based on a theorem given in [16], when successful, often result in such formulas. This opens many applications, including automated theorem. proving, static verification of integrity constraints in databases as well as reasoning with weakest sufficient and strongest necessary conditions. [267] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2006. Coordination of actions in an autonomous robotic system. In Oliviero Stock, Marco Schaerf, editors, Reasoning, Action and Interaction in AI Theories and Systems: Essays Dedicated to Luigia Carlucci Aiello, pages 177–191. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #4155. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-5403-7901-0, 978-3-5403-7902-7. DOI: 10.1007/11829263_10. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/bib/11430167 link: http://www.amazon.com/Reasoning-Action-I... The present book is a festschrift in honor of Luigia Carlucci Aiello. The 18 articles included are written by former students, friends, and international colleagues, who have cooperated with Luigia Carlucci Aiello, scientifically or in AI boards or committees. The contributions by reputed researchers span a wide range of AI topics and reflect the breadth and depth of Aiello's own work [266] Per Olof Pettersson and Patrick Doherty. 2006. Probabilistic roadmap based path planning for an autonomous unmanned helicopter. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 17(4):395–405. IOS Press. The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for artificial intelligence. For both military and civil applications, there is a desire to develop more sophisticated UAV platforms where the emphasis is placed on development of intelligent capabilities. Imagine a mission scenario where a UAV is supplied with a 3D model of a region containing buildings and road structures and is instructed to fly to an arbitrary number of building structures and collect video streams of each of the building's respective facades. In this article, we describe a fully operational UAV platform which can achieve such missions autonomously. We focus on the path planner integrated with the platform which can generate collision free paths autonomously during such missions. Both probabilistic roadmap-based (PRM) and rapidly exploring random trees-based (RRT) algorithms have been used with the platform. The PRM-based path planner has been tested together with the UAV platform in an urban environment used for UAV experimentation. [265] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2006. A knowledge processing middleware framework and its relation to the JDL data fusion model. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 17(4):335–351. IOS Press. Any autonomous system embedded in a dynamic and changing environment must be able to create qualitative knowledge and object structures representing aspects of its environment on the fly from raw or preprocessed sensor data in order to reason qualitatively about the environment and to supply such state information to other nodes in the distributed network in which it is embedded. These structures must be managed and made accessible to deliberative and reactive functionalities whose successful operation is dependent on being situationally aware of the changes in both the robotic agent's embedding and internal environments. DyKnow is a knowledge processing middleware framework which provides a set of functionalities for contextually creating, storing, accessing and processing such structures. The framework is implemented and has been deployed as part of a deliberative/reactive architecture for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle. The architecture itself is distributed and uses real-time CORBA as a communications infrastructure. We describe the system and show how it can be used to create more abstract entity and state representations of the world which can then be used for situation awareness by an unmanned aerial vehicle in achieving mission goals. We also show that the framework is a working instantiation of many aspects of the JDL data fusion model. [264] Patrick Doherty, John Mylopoulos and Christopher Welty. 2006. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Conference Proceedings. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-281-5. he National Conference on Artificial Intelligence remains the bellwether for research in artificial intelligence. Leading AI researchers and practitioners as well as scientists and engineers in related fields present theoretical, experimental, and empirical results, covering a broad range of topics that include principles of cognition, perception, and action; the design, application, and evaluation of AI algorithms and systems; architectures and frameworks for classes of AI systems; and analyses of tasks and domains in which intelligent systems perform. The Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence conference highlights successful applications of AI technology; explores issues, methods, and lessons learned in the development and deployment of AI applications; and promotes an interchange of ideas between basic and applied AI. This volume presents the proceedings of the latest conferences, held in July, 2006. [263] Martin Magnusson and Patrick Doherty. 2006. Deductive Planning with Temporal Constraints using TAL. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Practical Cognitive Agents and Robots (PCAR). UWA Press. ISBN: 1-74052-130-7. DOI: 10.1145/1232425.1232444. Temporal Action Logic is a well established logical formalism for reasoning about action and change using an explicit time representation that makes it suitable for applications that involve complex temporal reasoning. We take advantage of constraint satisfaction technology to facilitate such reasoning through temporal constraint networks. Extensions are introduced that make generation of action sequences possible, thus paving the road for interesting applications in deductive planning. The extended formalism is encoded as a logic program that is able to realize a least commitment strategy that generates partial order plans in the context of both qualitative and quantitative temporal constraints. [262] Anders Sandholm, Peter Bunus and Peter Fritzson. 2006. A Numeric Library for Use in Modelica Simulations with Lapack, SuperLU, Interpolation, and MatrixIO. In 5th International Modelica Conference Modelica2006,2006. [261] Andrzej Szalas. 2006. Second-order Reasoning in Description Logics. Journal of applied non-classical logics, 16(3 - 4):517–530. Éditions Hermès-Lavoisier. DOI: 10.3166/jancl.16.517-530. Description logics refer to a family of formalisms concentrated around concepts, roles and individuals. They belong to the most frequently used knowledge representation formalisms and provide a logical basis to a variety of well known paradigms. The main reasoning tasks considered in the area of description logics are those reducible to subsumption. On the other hand, any knowledge representation system should be equipped with a more advanced reasoning machinery. Therefore in the current paper we make a step towards integrating description logics with second-order reasoning. One of the important motivations behind introducing second-order formalism follows from the fact that many forms of commonsense and nonmonotonic reasoning used in AI can be modelled within the second-order logic. To achieve our goal we first extend description logics with a possibility to quantify over concepts. Since one of the main criticisms against the use of second-order formalisms is their complexity, we next propose second-order quantifier elimination techniques applicable to a large class of description logic formulas. Finally we show applications of the techniques, in particular in reasoning with circumscribed concepts and approximated terminological formulas. [260] Mariusz Wzorek, David Landén and Patrick Doherty. 2006. GSM Technology as a Communication Media for an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. In Proceedings of the 21st Bristol International UAV Systems Conference (UAVS). University of Bristol, Department of Aerospace engineering. ISBN: 0-9552644-0-5. Note: ISBN: 0-9552644-0-5 [259] Martin Magnusson. 2006. Natural Language Understanding using Temporal Action Logic. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Language Processing (KRAQ). Association for Computational Linguistics. We consider a logicist approach to natural language understanding based on the translation of a quasi-logical form into a temporal logic, explicitly constructed for the representation of action and change, and the subsequent reasoning about this semantic structure in the context of a background knowledge theory using automated theorem proving techniques. The approach is substantiated through a proof-of-concept question answering system implementation that uses a head-driven phrase structure grammar developed in the Linguistic Knowledge Builder to construct minimal recursion semantics structures which are translated into a Temporal Action Logic where both the SNARK automated theorem prover and the Allegro Prolog logic programming environment can be used for reasoning through an interchangeable compilation into first-order logic or logic programs respectively. [258] H.Joe Steinhauer. 2006. Qualitative Reconstruction and Update of an Object Constellation. In Proceedings of the Spatial and Temporal Reasoning Workshop at the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI). We provide a technique for describing, reconstructing and updating an object constellation of moving objects. The relations between the constituent objects, in particular axis-parallel and diagonal relations, are verbally expressed using the double cross method for qualitatively characterizing relations between pairs of objects. The same underlying representation is used to reconstruct the constellation from the given description. [257] H.Joe Steinhauer. 2006. Qualitative Communication about Object Scenes. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI). [256] Mariusz Wzorek, Gianpaolo Conte, Piotr Rudol, Torsten Merz, Simone Duranti and Patrick Doherty. 2006. From Motion Planning to Control - A Navigation Framework for an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. In Proceedings of the 21st Bristol UAV Systems Conference (UAVS). Link to Ph.D. Thesis: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:... The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) which can operate autonomously in dynamic and complex operational environments is becoming increasingly more common. While the application domains in which they are currently used are still predominantly military in nature, in the future we can expect wide spread usage in thecivil and commercial sectors. In order to insert such vehicles into commercial airspace, it is inherently important that these vehicles can generate collision-free motion plans and also be able to modify such plans during theirexecution in order to deal with contingencies which arise during the course of operation. In this paper, wepresent a fully deployed autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle, based on a Yamaha RMAX helicopter, whichis capable of navigation in urban environments. We describe a motion planning framework which integrates two sample-based motion planning techniques, Probabilistic Roadmaps and Rapidly Exploring Random Treestogether with a path following controller that is used during path execution. Integrating deliberative services, suchas planners, seamlessly with control components in autonomous architectures is currently one of the major open problems in robotics research. We show how the integration between the motion planning framework and thecontrol kernel is done in our system.Additionally, we incorporate a dynamic path reconfigurability scheme. It offers a surprisingly efficient method for dynamic replanning of a motion plan based on unforeseen contingencies which may arise during the execution of a plan. Those contingencies can be inserted via ground operator/UAV interaction to dynamically change UAV flight paths on the fly. The system has been verified through simulation and in actual flight. We present empirical results of the performance of the framework and the path following controller. [255] Torsten Merz, Piotr Rudol and Mariusz Wzorek. 2006. Control System Framework for Autonomous Robots Based on Extended State Machines. In ICAS 2006 - International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems,2006. [254] Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2006. The WITAS UAV Ground System Interface Demonstration with a Focus on Motion and Task Planning. In Software Demonstrations at the International Conference on Automated Planning Scheduling (ICAPS-SD), pages 36–37. The Autonomous UAV Technologies Laboratory at Linköping University, Sweden, has been developing fully autonomous rotor-based UAV systems in the mini- and micro-UAV class. Our current system design is the result of an evolutionary process based on many years of developing, testing and maintaining sophisticated UAV systems. In particular, we have used the Yamaha RMAX helicopter platform(Fig. 1) and developed a number of micro air vehicles from scratch. [253] Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2006. Reconfigurable Path Planning for an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. In Derek Long, Stephen F. Smith, Daniel Borrajo, Lee McCluskey, editors, Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), pages 438–441. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-270-9. In this paper, we present a motion planning framework for a fully deployed autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle which integrates two sample-based motion planning techniques, Probabilistic Roadmaps and Rapidly Exploring Random Trees. Additionally, we incorporate dynamic reconfigurability into the framework by integrating the motion planners with the control kernel of the UAV in a novel manner with little modification to the original algorithms. The framework has been verified through simulation and in actual flight. Empirical results show that these techniques used with such a framework offer a surprisingly efficient method for dynamically reconfiguring a motion plan based on unforeseen contingencies which may arise during the execution of a plan. The framework is generic and can be used for additional platforms. [252] Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2006. Reconfigurable Path Planning for an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. In ICHIT 2006 - International Conference on Hybrid Information Technology,2006. [251] Björn Hägglund and Anders Haraldsson. 2006. The Art and Virtue of Symbolic Constraint Propagation. In CP 2006 Twelfth International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming,2006. [250] Mikhail Chalabine, Christoph Kessler and Peter Bunus. 2006. Automated Round-trip Software Engineering in Aspect Weaving Systems. In 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2006. ASE '06., pages 305–308. In series: IEEE / ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering #??. IEEE/ACM. ISBN: 0-7695-2579-2. DOI: 10.1109/ASE.2006.20. We suggest an approach to Automated Round-trip Software Engineering in source-level aspect weaving systems that allows for transparent mapping of manual edits in the woven program back to the appropriate source of origin, which is either the application core or the aspect space. [249] Ewa Orlowska and Andrzej Szalas. 2006. Quantifier Elimination in Elementary Set Theory. In W. MacCaull, I. Duentsch, M. Winter, editors, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Relational Methods in Computer Science (RelMiCS), pages 237–248. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #3929. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. DOI: 10.1007/11734673_19. In the current paper we provide two methods for quantifier elimination applicable to a large class of formulas of the elementary set theory. The first one adapts the Ackermann method [1] and the second one adapts the fixpoint method of [20]. We show applications of the proposed techniques in the theory of correspondence between modal logics and elementary set theory. The proposed techniques can also be applied in an automated generation of proof rules based on the semantic-based translation of axioms of a given logic into the elementary set theory. [248] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz, Andrzej Skowron and Andrzej Szalas. 2006. Knowledge Representation Techniques.: a rough set approach. Book. In series: Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing #202. Springer. 342 pages. ISBN: 978-3-540-33518-4, 3-540-33518-8. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-33519-6. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/hitlist?d=libris&q=9... The basis for the material in this book centers around a long term research project with autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle systems. One of the main research topics in the project is knowledge representation and reasoning. The focus of the research has been on the development of tractable combinations of approximate and nonmonotonic reasoning systems. The techniques developed are based on intuitions from rough set theory. Efforts have been made to take theory into practice by instantiating research results in the context of traditional relational database or deductive database systems. This book contains a cohesive, self-contained collection of many of the theoretical and applied research results that have been achieved in this project and for the most part pertain to nonmonotonic and approximate reasoning systems developed for an experimental unmanned aerial vehicle system used in the project. This book should be of interest to the theoretician and applied researcher alike and to autonomous system developers and software agent and intelligent system developers. [247] Patrick Doherty, Martin Magnusson and Andrzej Szalas. 2006. Approximate Databases: A support tool for approximate reasoning. Journal of applied non-classical logics, 16(1-2):87–118. Éditions Hermès-Lavoisier. DOI: 10.3166/jancl.16.87-117. Note: Special issue on implementation of logics This paper describes an experimental platform for approximate knowledge databases called the Approximate Knowledge Database (AKDB), based on a semantics inspired by rough sets. The implementation is based upon the use of a standard SQL database to store logical facts, augmented with several query interface layers implemented in JAVA through which extensional, intensional and local closed world nonmonotonic queries in the form of crisp or approximate logical formulas can be evaluated tractably. A graphical database design user interface is also provided which simplifies the design of databases, the entering of data and the construction of queries. The theory and semantics for AKDBs is presented in addition to application examples and details concerning the database implementation. [246] Karolina Eliasson. 2006. The Use of Case-Based Reasoning in a Human-Robot Dialog System. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1248. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 130 pages. ISBN: 91-85523-78-X. Note: Report code: LiU{Tek{Lic{2006:29. As long as there have been computers, one goal has been to be able to communicate with them using natural language. It has turned out to be very hard to implement a dialog system that performs as well as a human being in an unrestricted domain, hence most dialog systems today work in small, restricted domains where the permitted dialog is fully controlled by the system.In this thesis we present two dialog systems for communicating with an autonomous agent:The first system, the WITAS RDE, focuses on constructing a simple and failsafe dialog system including a graphical user interface with multimodality features, a dialog manager, a simulator, and development infrastructures that provides the services that are needed for the development, demonstration, and validation of the dialog system. The system has been tested during an actual flight connected to an unmanned aerial vehicle.The second system, CEDERIC, is a successor of the dialog manager in the WITAS RDE. It is equipped with a built-in machine learning algorithm to be able to learn new phrases and dialogs over time using past experiences, hence the dialog is not necessarily fully controlled by the system. It also includes a discourse model to be able to keep track of the dialog history and topics, to resolve references and maintain subdialogs. CEDERIC has been evaluated through simulation tests and user tests with good results. [245] Patrik Haslum. 2006. Admissible Heuristics for Automated Planning. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #1004. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 164 pages. ISBN: 91-85497-28-2. Link to Licentiate Thesis: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:... The problem of domain-independent automated planning has been a topic of research in Artificial Intelligence since the very beginnings of the field. Due to the desire not to rely on vast quantities of problem specific knowledge, the most widely adopted approach to automated planning is search. The topic of this thesis is the development of methods for achieving effective search control for domain-independent optimal planning through the construction of admissible heuristics. The particular planning problem considered is the so called “classical” AI planning problem, which makes several restricting assumptions. Optimality with respect to two measures of plan cost are considered: in planning with additive cost, the cost of a plan is the sum of the costs of the actions that make up the plan, which are assumed independent, while in planning with time, the cost of a plan is the total execution time – makespan – of the plan. The makespan optimization objective can not, in general, be formulated as a sum of independent action costs and therefore necessitates a problem model slightly different from the classical one. A further small extension to the classical model is made with the introduction of two forms of capacitated resources. Heuristics are developed mainly for regression planning, but based on principles general enough that heuristics for other planning search spaces can be derived on the same basis. The thesis describes a collection of methods, including the hm, additive hm and improved pattern database heuristics, and the relaxed search and boosting techniques for improving heuristics through limited search, and presents two extended experimental analyses of the developed methods, one comparing heuristics for planning with additive cost and the other concerning the relaxed search technique in the context of planning with time, aimed at discovering the characteristics of problem domains that determine the relative effectiveness of the compared methods. Results indicate that some plausible such characteristics have been found, but are not entirely conclusive. [244] Per Olof Pettersson. 2006. Sampling-based Path Planning for an Autonomous Helicopter. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1229. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 141 pages. ISBN: 91–85497–15–0. Note: Report code: LiU–Tek–Lic–2006:10. Many of the applications that have been proposed for future small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are at low altitude in areas with many obstacles. A vital component for successful navigation in such environments is a path planner that can find collision free paths for the UAV.Two popular path planning algorithms are the probabilistic roadmap algorithm (PRM) and the rapidly-exploring random tree algorithm (RRT).Adaptations of these algorithms to an unmanned autonomous helicopter are presented in this thesis, together with a number of extensions for handling constraints at different stages of the planning process.The result of this work is twofold:First, the described planners and extensions have been implemented and integrated into the software architecture of a UAV. A number of flight tests with these algorithms have been performed on a physical helicopter and the results from some of them are presented in this thesis.Second, an empirical study has been conducted, comparing the performance of the different algorithms and extensions in this planning domain. It is shown that with the environment known in advance, the PRM algorithm generally performs better than the RRT algorithm due to its precompiled roadmaps, but that the latter is also usable as long as the environment is not too complex. The study also shows that simple geometric constraints can be added in the runtime phase of the PRM algorithm, without a big impact on performance. It is also shown that postponing the motion constraints to the runtime phase can improve the performance of the planner in some cases. 2005 [243] Alexander Kleiner. 2005. Game AI: The Shrinking Gap Between Computer Games and AI Systems. In G. Riva, F. Vatalaro, F. Davide, M. Alcañiz, editors, Ambient Intelligence: The evolution of technology, communication and cognition towards the future of human-computer interaction, pages 143–155. IOS Press. Link: http://www.neurovr.org/emerging/volume6.... The introduction of games for benchmarking intelligent systems has a long tradition in AI (Artificial Intelligence) research. Alan Turing was one of the first to mention that a computer can be considered as intelligent if it is able to play chess. Today AI benchmarks are designed to capture difficulties that humans deal with every day. They are carried out on robots with unreliable sensors and actuators or on agents integrated in digital environments that simulate aspects of the real world. One example is given by the annually held RoboCup competitions, where robots compete in a football game but also fight for the rescue of civilians in a simulated large-scale disaster simulation. Besides these scientific events, another environment, also challenging AI, originates from the commercial computer game market. Computer games are nowadays known for their impressive graphics and sound effects. However, the latest generation of game engines shows clearly that the trend leads towards more realistic physics simulations, agent centered perception, and complex player interactions due to the rapidly increasing degrees of freedom that digital characters obtain. This new freedom requests another quality of the player’s environment, a quality of ambient intelligence that appears both plausible and in real time. This intelligence has, for example, to control more than $40$ facial muscles of digital characters while they interact with humans, but also to control a team of digital characters for the support of human players. This article emphasizes the current difference between AI systems and digital characters in commercial computer games and emphasizes the advantages that arise if shrinking the gap between them. We sketch some methods currently utilized in RoboCup and relates them to methods found in commercial computer games. We show how methods from RoboCup might contribute to game AI and improve both the performance and plausibility of its digital characters. Furthermore, we describe state-of-the-art game engines and discuss the challenge but also opportunity they are offering to AI research. [242] Alexander Kleiner, Michael Brenner, Tobias Bräuer, Christian Dornhege, Moritz Göbelbecker, Matthias Luber, Johann Prediger, Joerg Stückler and Bernhard Nebel. 2005. ResQ Freiburg: Team Description and Evaluation. Technical Report. Institut für Informatik, Universität Freiburg. ResQ Freiburg is the world champion of the 2004 RoboCup competition in the Rescue simulation league. RoboCupRescue is a large-scale multi-agent simulation of urban disasters where, in order to save lives and minimize damage, rescue teams must effectively cooperate despite sensing and communication limitations. To accomplish this, ResQ Freiburg introduced new methods for hierarchical path planning, death-time prediction of civilians, coordination of multi-agent city exploration, as well as an any-time rescue sequence optimization based on genetic algorithms. To evaluate the usefulness of these techniques we performed an extensive evaluation of the log files of the best participating teams in the competition. Our analysis explains the reasons for our team’s success, and thus could also provide an evaluation tool for future competitions. [241] Alexander Kleiner, Michael Brenner, Tobias Bräuer, Christian Dornhege, Moritz Göbelbecker, Matthias Luber, Johann Prediger, Jörg Stückler and Bernhard Nebel. 2005. Successful Search and Rescue in Simulated Disaster Areas. In Robocup 2005: Robot Soccer World Cup IX, pages 323–334. RoboCupRescue Simulation is a large-scale multi-agent simulation of urban disasters where, in order to save lives and minimize damage, rescue teams must effectively cooperate despite sensing and communication limitations. This paper presents the comprehensive search and rescue approach of the ResQ Freiburg team, the winner in the RoboCupRescue Simulation league at RoboCup 2004. Specific contributions include the predictions of travel costs and civilian life-time, the efficient coordination of an active disaster space exploration, as well as an any-time rescue sequence optimization based on a genetic algorithm. We compare the performances of our team and others in terms of their capability of extinguishing fires, freeing roads from debris, disaster space exploration, and civilian rescue. The evaluation is carried out with information extracted from simulation log files gathered during RoboCup 2004. Our results clearly explain the success of our team, and also confirm the scientific approaches proposed in this paper. [240] T. A. Nüssle, Alexander Kleiner and M. Brenner. 2005. Approaching Urban Disaster Reality: The ResQ Firesimulator. In RoboCup 2004: Robot Soccer World Cup VIII, pages 474–482. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #3276/2005. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-32256-6_42. The RoboCupRescue Simulation project aims at simulating large-scale disasters in order to explore coordination strategies for real-life rescue missions. This can only be achieved if the simulation itself is as close to reality as possible. In this paper, we present a new fire simulator based on a realistic physical model of heat development and heat transport in urban fires. It allows to simulate three different ways of heat transport (radiation, convection, direct transport) and the influence of wind. The protective effects of spraying water on non-burning buildings is also simulated, thus allowing for more strategic and precautionary behavior of rescue agents. Our experiments showed the simulator to create realistic fire propagations both with and without influence of fire brigade agents. [239] Alexander Kleiner, B. Steder, C. Dornhege, D. Höfer, D. Meyer-Delius, J. Prediger, J. Stückler, K. Glogowski, M. Thurner, M. Luber, M. Schnell, R. Kuemmerle, T. Burk, T. Bräuer and B. Nebel. 2005. RoboCupRescue - Robot League Team RescueRobots Freiburg (Germany). In RoboCup 2005 (CDROM Proceedings), Team Description Paper, Rescue Robot League. Note: (1st place in the autonomy competition, 4th place in the teleoperation competition) This paper describes the approach of the RescueRobots Freiburg team. RescueRobots Freiburg is a team of students from the university of Freiburg, that originates from the former CS Freiburg team (RoboCupSoccer) and the ResQ Freiburg team (RoboCupRescue Simulation). Due to the high versatility of the RoboCupRescue competition we tackle the three arenas by a a twofold approach: On the one hand we want to introduce robust vehicles that can safely be teleoperated through rubble and building debris while constructing three-dimensional maps of the environment. On the other hand we want to introduce a team of autonomous robots that quickly explore a large terrain while building a two-dimensional map. This two solutions are particularly well-suited for the red and yellow arena, respectively. Our solution for the orange arena will finally be decided between these two, depending on the capabilities of both approaches at the venue. In this paper, we introduce some preliminary results that we achieved so far from map building, localization, and autonomous victim identification. Furthermore we introduce a custom made 3D Laser Range Finder (LRF) and a novel mechanism for the active distribution of RFID tags. [238] Peter Andersson. 2005. Hazard: a Framework Towards Connecting Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. In IJCAI Workshop on Reasoning, Representation and Learning in Computer Games. [237] Ewa Madalinska-Bugaj and Witold Lukaszewicz. 2005. Belief revision revisited. In Advances in Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of the 4th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI), pages 31–40. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #3789. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/11579427_4. In this paper, we propose a new belief revision operator, together with a method of its calculation. Our formalization differs from most of the traditional approaches in two respects. Firstly, we formally distinguish between defeasible observations and indefeasible knowledge about the considered world. In particular, our operator is differently specified depending on whether an input formula is an observation or a piece of knowledge. Secondly, we assume that a new observation, but not a new piece of knowledge, describes exactly what a reasoning agent knows at the moment about the aspect of the world the observation concerns. [236] Patrick Doherty, Andrzej Szalas and Witold Lukaszewicz. 2005. Similarity, approximations and vagueness. In Dominik Slezak, Guoyin Wang, Marcin S. Szczuka, Ivo Düntsch, Yiyu Yao, editors, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Rough Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Data Mining, and Granular Computing (RSFDGrC), pages 541–550. In series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #3641. Springer. ISBN: 3-540-28653-5. DOI: 10.1007/11548669_56. The relation of similarity is essential in understanding and developing frameworks for reasoning with vague and approximate concepts. There is a wide spectrum of choice as to what properties we associate with similarity and such choices determine the nature of vague and approximate concepts defined in terms of these relations. Additionally, robotic systems naturally have to deal with vague and approximate concepts due to the limitations in reasoning and sensor capabilities. Halpern [1] introduces the use of subjective and objective states in a modal logic formalizing vagueness and distinctions in transitivity when an agent reasons in the context of sensory and other limitations. He also relates these ideas to a solution to the Sorities and other paradoxes. In this paper, we generalize and apply the idea of similarity and tolerance spaces [2,3,4,5], a means of constructing approximate and vague concepts from such spaces and an explicit way to distinguish between an agent’s objective and subjective states. We also show how some of the intuitions from Halpern can be used with similarity spaces to formalize the above-mentioned Sorities and other paradoxes. [235] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2005. A knowledge processing middleware framework and its relation to the JDL data fusion model. In The 8th International Conference on Information Fusion,2005. [234] Anders Arpteg. 2005. Intelligent semi-structured information extraction: a user-driven approach to information extraction. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #946. Linköping University Electronic Press. 139 pages. ISBN: 91-85297-98-4. Note: This work has been supported by University of Kalmar and the Knowledge Foundation. The number of domains and tasks where information extraction tools can be used needs to be increased. One way to reach this goal is to design user-driven information extraction systems where non-expert users are able to adapt them to new domains and tasks. It is difficult to design general extraction systems that do not require expert skills or a large amount of work from the user. Therefore, it is difficult to increase the number of domains and tasks. A possible alternative is to design user-driven systems, which solve that problem by letting a large number of non-expert users adapt the systems themselves. To accomplish this goal, the systems need to become more intelligent and able to learn to extract with as little given information as possible.The type of information extraction system that is in focus for this thesis is semi-structured information extraction. The term semi-structured refers to documents that not only contain natural language text but also additional structural information. The typical application is information extraction from World Wide Web hypertext documents. By making effective use of not only the link structure but also the structural information within each such document, user-driven extraction systems with high performance can be built.There are two different approaches presented in this thesis to solve the user-driven extraction problem. The first takes a machine learning approach and tries to solve the problem using a modified $Q(\lambda)$ reinforcement learning algorithm. A problem with the first approach was that it was difficult to handle extraction from the hidden Web. Since the hidden Web is about 500 times larger than the visible Web, it would be very useful to be able to extract information from that part of the Web as well. The second approach is called the hidden observation approach and tries to also solve the problem of extracting from the hidden Web. The goal is to have a user-driven information extraction system that is also able to handle the hidden Web. The second approach uses a large part of the system developed for the first approach, but the additional information that is silently obtained from the user presents other problems and possibilities.An agent-oriented system was designed to evaluate the approaches presented in this thesis. A set of experiments was conducted and the results indicate that a user-driven information extraction system is possible and no longer just a concept. However, additional work and research is necessary before a fully-fledged user-driven system can be designed. [233] Michali Grabowski and Andrzej Szalas. 2005. A Technique for Learning Similarities on Complex Structures with Applications to Extracting Ontologies. In Proceedings of the 3rd Atlantic Web Intelligence Conference (AWIC), pages 991–995. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #3528. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/11495772_29. A general similarity-based algorithm for extracting ontologies from data has been provided in [1]. The algorithm works over arbitrary approximation spaces, modeling notions of similarity and mereological part-of relations (see, e.g., [2, 3, 4, 5]). In the current paper we propose a novel technique of machine learning similarity on tuples on the basis of similarities on attribute domains. The technique reflects intuitions behind tolerance spaces of [6] and similarity spaces of [7]. We illustrate the use of the technique in extracting ontologies from data. [232] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2005. Leonardo, an Approach towards the Consolidation of Computer Software System. Note: Research Article, CAISOR Archival Website, Number 2005-016 [231] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2005. Actions as a Basic Software Concept in the Leonardo Computation System. In IJCAI 2005 Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action and Change,2005. [230] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2005. Integration of Live Video in a System for Natural Language Dialog with a Robot. In Proceedings of the 9th workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue (SemDial). [229] Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2005. Reconfigurable path planning for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle. In National Swedish Workshop on Autonomous Systems, SWAR 05,2005. [228] Mariusz Wzorek and Patrick Doherty. 2005. Preliminary report: Reconfigurable path planning for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Workshop of the UK Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Group (PlanSIG). [227] Patrick Doherty. 2005. Knowledge representation and unmanned aerial vehicles. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT), pages 9–16. IEEE Computer Society. ISBN: 0-7695-2416-8. DOI: 10.1109/IAT.2005.93. Knowledge representation technologies play a fundamental role in any autonomous system that includes deliberative capability and that internalizes models of its internal and external environments. Integrating both high- and low-end autonomous functionality seamlessly in autonomous architectures is currently one of the major open problems in robotics research. UAVs offer especially difficult challenges in comparison with ground robotic systems due to the often tight time constraints and safety considerations that must be taken into account. This article provides an overview of some of the knowledge representation technologies and deliberative capabilities developed for a fully deployed autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle system to meet some of these challenges. [226] Bourhane Kadmiry. 2005. Fuzzy gain scheduled visual servoing for an unmanned helicopter. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #938. Linköpings universitet. 148 pages. ISBN: 91-85297-76-3. The overall objective of the Wallenberg Laboratory for Information Technology and Autonomous Systems (WITAS) at Linkoping University is the development of an intelligent command and control system, containing active-vision sensors, which supports the operation of an unmanned air vehicle (UAV). One of the UA V platforms of choice is the R5O unmanned helicopter, by Yamaha.The present version of the UAV platform is augmented with a camera system. This is enough for performing missions like site mapping, terrain exploration, in which the helicopter motion can be rather slow. But in tracking missions, and obstacle avoidance scenarios, involving high-speed helicopter motion, robust performance for the visual-servoing scheme is desired. Robustness in this case is twofold: 1) w.r.t time delays introduced by the image processing; and 2) w.r.t disturbances, parameter uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics which reflect on the feature position in the image, and the camera pose.With this goal in mind, we propose to explore the possibilities for the design of fuzzy controllers, achieving stability, robust and minimal-cost performance w.r.t time delays and unstructured uncertainties for image feature tracking, and test a control solution in both simulation and on real camera platforms. Common to both are model-based design by the use of nonlinear control approaches. The performance of these controllers is tested in simulation using the nonlinear geometric model of a pin-hole camera. Then we implement and test the reSUlting controller on the camera platform mounted on the UAV. [225] Patrik Haslum, Blai Bonet and Hector Geffner. 2005. New Admissible Heuristics for Domain-Independent Planning. In Proceedings of the 20th national ´Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). AAAI Press. ISBN: 1-57735-236-X. Admissible heuristics are critical for effective domain-independent planning when optimal solutions must be guaranteed. Two useful heuristics are the hm heuristics, which generalize the reachability heuristic underlying the planning graph, and pattern database heuristics. These heuristics, however, have serious limitations: reachability heuristics capture only the cost of critical paths in a relaxed problem, ignoring the cost of other relevant paths, while PDB heuristics, additive or not, cannot accommodate too many variables in patterns, and methods for automatically selecting patterns that produce good estimates are not known.We introduce two refinements of these heuristics: First, the additive hm heuristic which yields an admissible sum of hm heuristics using a partitioning of the set of actions. Second, the constrained PDB heuristic which uses constraints from the original problem to strengthen the lower bounds obtained from abstractions.The new heuristics depend on the way the actions or problem variables are partitioned. We advance methods for automatically deriving additive hm and PDB heuristics from STRIPS encodings. Evaluation shows improvement over existing heuristics in several domains, although, not surprisingly, no heuristic dominates all the others over all domains. [224] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2005. A Knowledge processing Middleware Framework and its Relation to the JDL Data Fusion model. In SWAR 05,2005, pages 50–51. [223] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2005. A Knowledge processing Middleware Framework and its Relation to the JDL Data Fusion model. In 3rd joint SAIS-SSL event on Artificial Intelligence an Learning Systems,2005. Mälardalens University. [222] Peter Andersson. 2005. Hazard: A Framework Towards Connecting Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Multi-Agent Robotic Systems (MARS). INSTICC PRESS. [221] Per Nyblom. 2005. Handling Uncertainty by Interleaving Cost-Aware Classical Planning with Execution. In 3rd joint SAIS-SSL event on Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems,2005. [220] Martin Magnusson, Patrick Doherty and Andrzej Szalas. 2005. An Experimental Platform for Approximate Databases. In 3rd joint SAIS-SSL event on Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems,2005. [219] Per Olof Pettersson and Patrick Doherty. 2005. Probabilistic Roadmap Based Path Planning for an Autonomous Unmanned Helicopter. In Peter Funk, Thorsteinn Rögnvaldsson and Ning Xiong, editors, Proceedings of the 3rd joint SAIS-SSLS event on Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems (SAIS-SSLS). Mälardalen University. The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerialvehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recentyears and offers a great number of research challenges for artificialintelligence. For both military and civil applications, thereis a desire to develop more sophisticated UAV platforms wherethe emphasis is placed on development of intelligent capabilities.Imagine a mission scenario where a UAV is supplied with a 3Dmodel of a region containing buildings and road structures andis instructed to fly to an arbitrary number of building structuresand collect video streams of each of the building’s respectivefacades. In this article, we describe a fully operational UAVplatform which can achieve such missions autonomously. Wefocus on the path planner integrated with the platform which cangenerate collision free paths autonomously during such missions.It is based on the use of probabilistic roadmaps. The path plannerhas been tested together with the UAV platform in an urbanenvironment used for UAV experimentation. [218] Karolina Eliasson. 2005. Towards a Robotic Dialogue System with Learning and Planning Capabilities. In Ingrid Zukerman, Jan Alexandersson , Arne Jönsson, editors, Proceedings of the IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning in Practical Dialogue Systems (KRPDS), pages 1–7. We present a robotic dialogue system built on casebased reasoning. The system is capable of solving references and manage sub-dialogues in a dialogue with an operator in natural language. The approach to handle dialogue acts and physical acts in a unison manner together with the use of plans and subplans makes the system very flexible. This flexibility is used for learning purposes where the operator teaches the system a new word and the new knowledge can directly be integrated and used in the old plans. The learning from explanation capability makes the system adaptable to the operator's use of language and the domain it is currently operating in. The implementation of a case-based planner suggested in the paper will further increase the learning and adaptation degree. [217] Karolina Eliasson. 2005. Integrating a Discourse Model with a Learning Case-Based Reasoning System. In Proceedings of the 9th workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue (SemDial). We present a discourse model integrated with a case-based reasoning dialogue system which learns from experience. The discourse model is capable of solving references, manage subdialogues and respect the current topic in a dialogue in natural language. The framework is flexible enough not to disturb the learning functions, but allows dynamic changes to a large extent. The system is tested in a traffic surveillance domain together with a simulated UAV and is found to be robust and reliable. [216] Karolina Eliasson. 2005. An Integrated Discourse Model for a Case-Based Reasoning Dialogue System. In 3rd joint SAIS-SSL event on Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems,2005. [215] Jonas Kvarnström. 2005. TALplanner and other extensions to Temporal Action Logic. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #937. Linköpings universitet. 302 pages. ISBN: 91-85297-75-5. Though the exact definition of the boundary between intelligent and non-intelligent artifacts has been a subject of much debate, one aspect of intelligence that many would deem essential is deliberation: Rather than reacting \"instinctively\" to its environment, an intelligent system should also be capable of reasoning about it, reasoning about the effects of actions performed by itself and others, and creating and executing plans, that is, determining which actions to perform in order to achieve certain goals. True deliberation is a complex topic, requiring support from several different sub-fields of artificial intelligence. The work presented in this thesis spans two of these partially overlapping fields, beginning with reasoning about action and change and eventually moving over towards planning.The qualification problem relates to the difficulties inherent in providing, for each action available to an agent, an exhaustive list of all qualifications to the action, that is, all the conditions that may prevent the action from being executed in the intended manner. The first contribution of this thesis is a framework for modeling qualifications in Temporal Action Logic (TAL).As research on reasoning about action and change proceeds, increasingly complex and interconnected domains are modeled in increasingly greater detail. Unless the resulting models are structured consistently and coherently, they will be prohibitively difficult to maintain. The second contribution is a framework for structuring TAL domains using object-oriented concepts.Finally, the second half of the thesis is dedicated to the task of planning. TLplan pioneered the idea of using domain-specific control knowledge in a temporal logic to constrain the search space of a forward-chaining planner. We develop a new planner called TALplanner, based on the same idea but with fundamental differences in the way the planner verifies that a plan satisfies control formulas. T ALplanner generates concurrent plans and can take resource constraints into account. The planner also applies several new automated domain analysis techniques to control formulas, further increasing performance by orders of magnitude for many problem domains. [214] H.Joe Steinhauer. 2005. Towards a Qualitative Model for Natural Language Communication about Vehicle Traffic. In IJCAI 2005 Workshop on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning,2005. [213] H.Joe Steinhauer. 2005. A Qualitative Model for Natural Language Communication about Vehicle Traffic. In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Reasoning with Mental and External Diagrams - Computational Modeling and Spatial Assistance, pages 52–57. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-232-7. In this paper we describe a qualitative approach for natural language communication about vehicle traffic. It is an intuitive and simple model that can be used as the basis for defining more detailed position descriptions and transitions. It can also function as a framework for relating different aggregation levels. We apply a diagrammatic abstraction of traffic that mirrors the different possible interpretations of it and with this the different mental abstractions that humans might make. The abstractions are kept in parallel and according to the communicative context it will be switched to the corresponding interpretation. [212] Peter Bunus. 2005. An Empirical Study on Debugging Equation-based Simulation Models. In 4th International Modelica Conference,2005. Link: http://www.modelica.org 2004 [211] Alexander Kleiner and Moritz Göbelbecker. 2004. Rescue3D: Making Rescue Simulation Attractive to the Public. Technical Report. Institut für Informatik, Universität Freiburg. RoboCupRescue Simulation is a large-scale multi-agent simulation of urban disasters where, in order to save lives and minimize damage, rescue teams must effectively cooperate despite sensing and communication limitations. The annually increasing number of teams participating in this league shows clearly that there is a high demand on research in this field. However, from our experience of participating at RoboCup as a team, but also from organizing RoboCupRescue as a public event, we learned about two strong limitations that arise practically during the competition: First, the current system offers only limited methods for comparing specific abilities of rescue teams. Second, the current presentation of the competition is only limited understandable for spectators. Within our effort in developing a new visualization of the rescue domain, we want to focus on these two limitations. We introduce a system for visualization that covers the demands of both developers and spectators. [210] Alexander Kleiner, Michael Brenner, Tobias Bräuer, Christian Dornhege, Moritz Göbelbecker, Matthias Luber, Johann Prediger and Joerg Stückler. 2004. ResQ Freiburg: Team Description and Evaluation. In RoboCup 2004 (CDROM Proceedings), Team Description Paper, Rescue Simulation League. Note: (1st place in the competition) ResQ Freiburg is the world champion of the 2004 RoboCup competition in the Rescue simulation league. RoboCupRescue is a large-scale multi-agent simulation of urban disasters where, in order to save lives and minimize damage, rescue teams must effectively cooperate despite sensing and communication limitations. To accomplish this, ResQ Freiburg introduced new methods for hierarchical path planning, death-time prediction of civilians, coordination of multi-agent city exploration, as well as an any-time rescue sequence optimization based on genetic algorithms. To evaluate the usefulness of these techniques we performed an extensive evaluation of the log files of the best participating teams in the competition. Our analysis explains the reasons for our team’s success, and thus could also provide an evaluation tool for future competitions. [209] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2004. DyKnow: A Framework for Processing Dynamic Knowledge and Object Structures in Autonomous Systems. In Proceedings of the Second Joint SAIS/SSLS Workshop. [208] Patrik Haslum. 2004. Patterns in Reactive Programs. In Patrick Doherty, Gerhard Lakemeyer, Angel P. de Pobil, editors, Proceedings of the 4th International Cognitive Robotics Workshop (COGROB), pages 25–29. In this paper, I explore the idea that there are “patterns”,analogous to software design patterns, in the kind of task proceduresthat frequently form the reactive component of architectures for intelligentautonomous systems. The investigation is carried out mainlywithin the context of the WITAS UAV project. [207] Patrick Doherty, Steven Kertes, Martin Magnusson and Andrzej Szalas. 2004. Towards a logical analysis of biochemical pathways. In José Júlio Alferes and João Alexandre Leite, editors, Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA), pages 667–679. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #3229. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-23242-1. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-30227-8_55. Biochemical pathways or networks are generic representations used to model many different types of complex functional and physical interactions in biological systems. Models based on experimental results are often incomplete, e.g., reactions may be missing and only some products are observed. In such cases, one would like to reason about incomplete network representations and propose candidate hypotheses, which when represented as additional reactions, substrates, products, would complete the network and provide causal explanations for the existing observations. In this paper, we provide a logical model of biochemical pathways and show how abductive hypothesis generation may be used to provide additional information about incomplete pathways. Hypothesis generation is achieved using weakest and strongest necessary conditions which represent these incomplete biochemical pathways and explain observations about the functional and physical interactions being modeled. The techniques are demonstrated using metabolism and molecular synthesis examples. [206] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2004. DyKnow: An approach to middleware for knowledge processing. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 15(1):3–13. IOS Press. Any autonomous system embedded in a dynamic and changing environment must be able to create qualitative knowledge and object structures representing aspects of its environment on the fly from raw or preprocessed sensor data in order to reason qualitatively about the environment. These structures must be managed and made accessible to deliberative and reactive functionalities which are dependent on being situationally aware of the changes in both the robotic agent's embedding and internal environment. DyKnow is a software framework which provides a set of functionalities for contextually accessing, storing, creating and processing such structures. The system is implemented and has been deployed in a deliberative/reactive architecture for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle. The architecture itself is distributed and uses real-time CORBA as a communications infrastructure. We describe the system and show how it can be used in execution monitoring and chronicle recognition scenarios for UAV applications. [205] Joakim Gustafsson and Jonas Kvarnström. 2004. Elaboration tolerance through object-orientation. Artificial Intelligence, 153(1-2):239–285. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2003.08.004. Although many formalisms for reasoning about action and change have been proposed in the literature, any concrete examples provided in such articles have primarily consisted of tiny domains that highlight some particular aspect or problem. However, since some of the classical problems are now completely or partially solved and since powerful tools are becoming available, it is now necessary to start modeling more complex domains. This article presents a methodology for handling such domains in a systematic manner using an object-oriented framework and provides several examples of the elaboration tolerance exhibited by the resulting models. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. [204] Peter Bunus and Peter Fritzson. 2004. Automated static analysis of equation-based components. Simulation (San Diego, Calif.), 80(7-8):321–345. DOI: 10.1177/0037549704046340. Mathematical modeling and the simulation of complex physical systems are emerging as key technologies in engineering. The availability of static analyzers and automatic debuggers for detecting structural and numerical inconsistencies in the simulation models is crucial. To address this need, the authors propose a methodology for detecting and repairing overconstrained and underconstrained situations based on graph-theoretical approaches. Components and equations that cause the irregularities are automatically isolated, and meaningful error messages for the user are elaborated. The authors have implemented the AMOEBA (Automatic Modelica Equation-Based Analyzer) environment to support the development and specification of correct equation-based simulation models by applying graph-theoretical approaches and semiautomatic debugging techniques. The implementation architecture and preliminary experiments with a prototype debugger integrated in the symbolic and numeric engine, ModSimPack, of the Modelica language compiler are presented and discussed. [203] Bourhane Kadmiry and D. Driankov. 2004. A fuzzy gain-scheduler for the attitude control of an unmanned helicopter. IEEE transactions on fuzzy systems, 12(4):502–515. IEEE Computer Society. DOI: 10.1109/TFUZZ.2004.832539. In this paper, we address the design of an attitude controller that achieves stable, and robust aggressive maneuverability for an unmanned helicopter. The controller proposed is in the form of a fuzzy gain-scheduler, and is used for stable and robust altitude, roll, pitch, and yaw control. The controller is obtained from a realistic nonlinear multiple-input-multiple-output model of a real unmanned helicopter platform, the APID-MK3. The results of this work are illustrated by extensive simulation, showing that the objective of aggressive, and robust maneuverability has been achieved. © 2004 IEEE. [202] Peter Bunus. 2004. Debugging techniques for equation-based languages. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #873. Linköping University. 243 pages. ISBN: 91-7373-941-3. Mathematical modeling and simulation of complex physical systems is emerging as a key technology in engineering. Modern approaches to physical system simulation allow users to specify simulation models with the help of equation-based languages. Such languages have been designed to allow automatic generation of efficient simulation code from declarative specifications. Complex simulation models are created by combining available model components from user-defined libraries. The resulted models are compiled in a simulation environment for efficient execution.The main objective of this thesis work is to develop significantly improved declarative debugging techniques for equation-based languages. Both static and dynamic debugging methods have been considered in this context.A typical problem which often appears in physical system modeling and simulation is when too many/few equations are specified in a systems of equations. This leads to a situation where the simulation model is inconsistent and therefore cannot be compiled and executed. The user should deal with over- and under-constrained situation by identifying the minimal set of equations or variables that should be removed/added from the equation system in order to make the remaining set of equations solvable.In this context, this thesis proposes new methods for debugging over- and under-constrained systems of equations. We propose a methodology for detecting and repairing over- and underconstrained situations based on graph theoretical methods. Components and equations that cause the irregularities are automatically isolated, and meaningful error messages for the user are presented. A major contribution of the thesis is our approach to reduce the potentially large number of error fixing alternatives by applying filtering rules extracted from the modeling language semantics.The thesis illustrates that it is possible to localize and repair a significant number of errors during static analysis of an object-oriented equation-based model without having to execute the simulation model. In this way certain numerical failures can be avoided later during the execution process. The thesis proves that the result of structural static analysis performed on the underlying system of equations can effectively be used to statically debug real models.A semi-automated algorithmic debugging framework is proposed for dynamic fault localization and behavior verification of simulation models. The run-time debugger is automatically invoked when an assertion generated from a formal specification of the simulation model behavior is violated. Analysis of the execution trace decorated with data dependency graph in the form of the Block Lower Triangular Dependency Graph (BLTDG) extracted from the language compiler is the basis of the debugging algorithm proposed in the thesis. We show how program slicing and dicing performed at the intermediate code level combined with assertion checking techniques to a large extent can automate the error finding process and behavior verification for physical system simulation models. Via an interactive session, the user is able to repair errors caused by incorrectly specified equations and incorrect parameter values.The run-time algorithmic debugger described in the thesis represents the first major effort in adapting automated debugging techniques to equation-based languages. To our knowledge none of the existing simulation environments associated with such languages provides support for run-time declarative automatic debugging.This thesis makes novel contributions to the structure and design of easy-to-use equation-based modeling and simulation environments and illustrates the role of structural static analysis and algorithmic automated debugging in this setting. The scope and feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by a prototype environment [201] Håkan Lundvall, Peter Bunus and Peter Fritzson. 2004. Towards Automatic Generation of Model Checkable Code from Modelica. In SIMS 2004, the 45th Conference on Simulation and Modelling. September 2004,2004. [200] Peter Fritzson, Vadim Engelson, Andreas Idebrant, Peter Aronsson, Håkan Lundvall, Peter Bunus and Kaj Nyström. 2004. Modelica - A Strongly Typed System Specification Language for Safe Engineering Practices. In SIMSAFE2004,2004. [199] Bourhane Kadmiry and P Bergsten. 2004. Robust Fuzzy Gain Scheduled visual-servoing with Sampling Time Uncertainties. In IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control ISIC,2004. Abstract-This paper addresses the robust fuzzy control problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems in the presence of sampling time uncertainties in a visual-servoing control scheme. The Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model is adopted for the nonlinear geometric model of a pin-hole camera, which presents second-order nonlinearities. The case of the discrete T-S fuzzy system with sampling-time uncertainty is considered and a multi-objective robust fuzzy controller design is proposed for the uncertain fuzzy system. The sufficient conditions are formulated in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMI). The effectiveness of the proposed controller design methodology is demonstrated through numerical simulation, then tested on a EVI-D31 SONY camera. [198] Bourhane Kadmiry and Dimiter Driankov. 2004. A Fuzzy Flight Controller Combining Linguistic and Model-based Fuzzy Control. Fuzzy sets and systems (Print), 146(3):313–347. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.fss.2003.07.002. In this paper we address the design of a fuzzy flight controller that achieves stable and robust -aggressive- manoeuvrability for an unmanned helicopter. The fuzzy flight controller proposed consists of a combination of a fuzzy gain scheduler and linguistic (Mamdani-type) controller. The fuzzy gain scheduler is used for stable and robust altitude, roll, pitch, and yaw control. The linguistic controller is used to compute the inputs to the fuzzy gain scheduler, i.e., desired values for roll, pitch, and yaw at given desired altitude and horizontal velocities. The flight controller is obtained and tested in simulation using a realistic nonlinear MIMO model of a real unmanned helicopter platform, the APID-MK [197] Bourhane Kadmiry and Dimiter Driankov. 2004. Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Gain Scheduling with Sampling-Time Uncertainties. In IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems Fuzz-IEEE 2004,2004. This paper addresses the robust fuzzy control problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems in the presence of sampling time uncertainties. The case of the discrete T-S fuzzy system with sampling-time uncertainty is considered and a robust controller design method is proposed. The sufficient conditions and the design procedure are formulated in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMI). The effectiveness of the proposed controller design methodology is demonstrated of a visual-servoing control problem [196] Ubbo Visser and Patrick Doherty. 2004. Issues in Designing Physical Agents for Dynamic Real-Time Environments: World Modeling, Planning, Learning, and Communicating. The AI Magazine, 25(2):137–138. AAAI Press. This article discusses a workshop held in conjunction with the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), held in Acapulco, Mexico, on 11 August 2003. [195] Patrick Doherty. 2004. Advanced Research with Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, pages 731–732. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-199-3. The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. For both military and civilian applications, there is a desire to develop more sophisticated UAV platforms where the emphasis is placed on intelligent capabilities and their integration in complex distributed software architectures. Such architectures should support the integration of deliberative, reactive and control functionalities in addition to the UAV’s integration with larger network centric systems. In my talk I will present some of the research and results from a long term basic research project with UAVs currently being pursued at Linköping University, Sweden. The talk will focus on knowledge representation techniques used in the project and the support for these techniques provided by the software architecture developed for our UAV platform, a Yamaha RMAX helicopter. Additional focus will be placed on some of the planning and execution monitoring functionality developed for our applications in the areas of traffic monitoring, surveying and photogrammetry and emergency services assistance. [194] Per Olof Pettersson and Patrick Doherty. 2004. Probabilistic Roadmap Based Path Planning for an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. In ICAPS-04 Workshop on Connecting Planning Theory with Practice,2004, pages 49–55. [193] H.Joe Steinhauer. 2004. The Qualitative Description of Traffic Maneuvers. In ECAI Workshop on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning,2004, pages 141–148. [192] Patrick Doherty, Patrik Haslum, Fredrik Heintz, Torsten Merz, Per Nyblom, Tommy Persson and Björn Wingman. 2004. A Distributed Architecture for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Experimentation. In 7th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems,2004. LAAS. [191] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2004. Managing Dynamic Object Structures using Hypothesis Generation and Validation. In AAAI Workshop on Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data,2004, pages 54–62. AAAI Press. [190] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2004. DyKnow: A Framework for Processing Dynamic Knowledge and Object Structures in Autonomous Systems. In Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Andrzej Jankowski, Andrzej Skowron, Marcin Szczuka, editors, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Monitoring, Security, and Rescue Techniques in Multi-Agent Systems (MSRAS), pages 479–492. In series: Advances in Soft Computing #28. Springer. ISBN: 978-3540232452. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-32370-8_37. Any autonomous system embedded in a dynamic and changing environment must be able to create qualitative knowledge and object structures representing aspects of its environment on the fly from raw or preprocessed sensor data in order to reason qualitatively about the environment. These structures must be managed and made accessible to deliberative and reactive functionalities which are dependent on being situationally aware of the changes in both the robotic agent’s embedding and internal environment. DyKnow is a software framework which provides a set of functionalities for contextually accessing, storing, creating and processing such structures. The system is implemented and has been deployed in a deliberative/reactive architecture for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle. The architecture itself is distributed and uses real-time CORBA as a communications infrastructure. We describe the system and show how it can be used in execution monitoring and chronicle recognition scenarios for UAV applications. [189] Torsten Merz. 2004. Building a System for Autonomous Aerial Robotics Research. In Proceedings of the 5th IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV). Elsevier. ISBN: 008-044237-4. [188] Gianpaolo Conte, Simone Duranti and Torsten Merz. 2004. Dynamic 3D path following for an autonomous helicopter. In Proceedings of the 5th IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV). Elsevier. ISBN: 008-044237-4. Link to Licentiate Thesis: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:... A hybrid control system for dynamic path following for an autonomous helicopter is described. The hierarchically structured system combines continuous control law execution with event-driven state machines. Trajectories are defined by a sequence of 3D path segments and velocity profiles, where each path segment is described as a parametric curve. The method can be used in combination with a path planner for flying collision-free in a known environment. Experimental flight test results are shown. [187] Patrick Doherty, Steven Kertes, Martin Magnusson and Andrzej Szalas. 2004. Towards a Logical Analysis of Biochemical Reactions (Extended abstract). In Ramon López de Mántaras, Lorenza Saitta, editors, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), pages 997–998. IOS Press. ISBN: 1-58603-452-9. We provide a logical model of biochemical reactions and show how hypothesis generation using weakest sufficient and strongest necessary conditions may be used to provide additional information in the context of an incomplete model of metabolic pathways. [186] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2004. Approximate Databases and Query Techniques for Agents with Heterogenous Perceptual Capabilities. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Fusion, pages 175–182. ISIF. ISBN: 91-7056-115-X. In this paper, we propose a framework that provides software and robotic agents with the ability to ask approximate questions to each other in the context of heterogeneous and contextually limited perceptual capabilities. The framework focuses on situations where agents have varying ability to perceive their environments. These limitations on perceptual capability are formalized using the idea of tolerance spaces. It is assumed that each agent has one or more approximate databases where approximate relations are represented using intuitions from rough set theory. It is shown how sensory and other limitations can be taken into account when constructing approximate databases for each respective agent. Complex relations inherit the approximativeness inherent in the sensors and primitive relations used in their definitions. Agents then query these databases and receive answers through the filters of their perceptual limitations as represented by tolerance spaces and approximate queries. The techniques used are all tractable. [185] Patrick Doherty and Andrzej Szalas. 2004. On the Correspondence between Approximations and Similarity. In Shusaku Tsumoto, Roman Slowinski, Jan Komorowski and Jerzy W. Grzymala-Busse, editors, Proceedings of the International Conference on Rough Sets and Current Trends in Computing (RSCTC), pages 143–152. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #3066. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-25929-9_16. This paper focuses on the use and interpretation of approximate databases where both rough sets and indiscernibility partitions are generalized and replaced by approximate relations and similarity spaces. Similarity spaces are used to define neighborhoods around individuals and these in turn are used to define approximate sets and relations. There is a wide spectrum of choice as to what properties the similarity relation should have and how this affects the properties of approximate relations in the database. In order to make this interaction precise, we propose a technique which permits specification of both approximation and similarity constraints on approximate databases and automatic translation between them. This technique provides great insight into the relation between similarity and approximation and is similar to that used in modal correspondence theory. In order to automate the translations, quantifier elimination techniques are used. [184] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2004. Approximative Query Techniques for Agents with Heterogeneous Ontologies and Perceptive Capabilities. In Didier Dubois, Christopher A. Welty, Mary-Anne Williams, editors, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, pages 459–468. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-199-3. In this paper, we propose a framework that provides software and robotic agents with the ability to ask approximate questions to each other in the context of heterogeneous ontologies and heterogeneous perceptive capabilities.The framework combines the use of logic-based techniques with ideas from approximate reasoning. Initial queries by an agent are transformed into approximate queries using weakest sufficient and strongest necessary conditions on the query and are interpreted as lower and upper approximations on the query. Once the base communication ability is provided, the framework is extended to situations where there is not only a mismatch between agent ontologies, but the agents have varying ability to perceive their environments. This will affect each agent’s ability to ask and interpret results of queries. Limitations on perceptive capability are formalized using the idea of tolerance spaces. [183] Patrick Doherty, Jaroslaw Kachniarz and Andrzej Szalas. 2004. Using Contextually Closed Queries for Local Closed-World Reasoning in Rough Knowledge Databases. In Andrzej Skowron,Lech Polkowski ,Sankar K Pal, editors, Rough-Neural Computing: Techniques for Computing with Words, pages 219–250. In series: Cognitive Technologies #??. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-43059-9, 35-4043-059-8. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/bib/14144444 find book in another country/hitta boken i ett annat land: http://www.worldcat.org/title/rough-neur... Soft computing comprises various paradigms dedicated to approximately solving real-world problems, e.g., in decision making, classification or learning; among these paradigms are fuzzy sets, rough sets, neural networks, and genetic algorithms.It is well understood now in the soft computing community that hybrid approaches combining various paradigms provide very promising attempts to solving complex problems. Exploiting the potential and strength of both neural networks and rough sets, this book is devoted to rough-neurocomputing which is also related to the novel aspect of computing based on information granulation, in particular to computing with words. It provides foundational and methodological issues as well as applications in various fields. [182] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz, Andrzej Skowron and Andrzej Szalas. 2004. Approximation Transducers and Trees: A Technique for Combining Rough and Crisp Knowledge. In Andrzej Skowron,Lech Polkowski ,Sankar K Pal, editors, Rough-Neural Computing: Techniques for Computing with Words, pages 189–218. In series: Cognitive Technologies #??. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-43059-9, 35-4043-059-8. find book at a swedish library/hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/bib/14144444 find book in another country/hitta boken i ett annat land: http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldc... Soft computing comprises various paradigms dedicated to approximately solving real-world problems, e.g., in decision making, classification or learning; among these paradigms are fuzzy sets, rough sets, neural networks, and genetic algorithms.It is well understood now in the soft computing community that hybrid approaches combining various paradigms provide very promising attempts to solving complex problems. Exploiting the potential and strength of both neural networks and rough sets, this book is devoted to rough-neurocomputing which is also related to the novel aspect of computing based on information granulation, in particular to computing with words. It provides foundational and methodological issues as well as applications in various fields. [181] Patrik Haslum. 2004. Improving Heuristics Through Search. In Ramon López de Mántaras, Lorenza Saitta, editors, Proceedings of the 16th Eureopean Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), pages 1031–1032. IOS Press. ISBN: 1-58603-452-9. We investigate two methods of using limited search to improve admissible heuristics for planning, similar to pattern databases and pattern searches. We also develop a new algorithm for searching AND/OR graphs 2003 [180] Patrick Doherty, W. Lukaszewicz, Skowron Andrzej and Andrzej Szalas. 2003. Knowledge Representation and Approximate Reasoning. Conference Proceedings. In series: Fundamenta Informaticae #2003(57):2-4. IOS Press. Note: Special Issue [179] Alexander Kleiner and T. Buchheim. 2003. A Plugin-Based Architecture for Simulation in the F2000 League. In In RoboCup 2003: Robot Soccer World Cup VII, pages 434–445. Simulation has become an essential part in the development process of autonomous robotic systems. In the domain of robotics, developers often are confronted with problems like noisy sensor data, hardware malfunctions and scarce or temporarily inoperable hardware resources. A solution to most of the problems can be given by tools which allow the simulation of the application scenario in varying degrees of abstraction and the suppression of unwanted features of the domain (like e.g. sensor noise). The RoboCup scenario of autonomous mobile robots playing soccer is one such domain where the above mentioned problems typically arise. [178] E. Schulenburg, T. Weigel and Alexander Kleiner. 2003. Self-Localization in Dynamic Environments based on Laser and Vision Data. In Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 998–1004. IEEE. ISBN: 0-7803-7860-1. DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2003.1250758. For a robot situated in a dynamic real world environment the knowledge of its position and orientation is very advantageous and sometimes essential for carrying out a given task. Particularly, one would appreciate a robust, accurate and efficient selflocalization method which allows a global localization of the robot. In certain polygonal environments a laser based localization method is capable of combining all these properties by correlating observed lines with an a priori line model of the environment [5] . However, often line features can rather be detected by a vision system than by a laser range finder. For this reason we propose an extension of the laser based approach for the simultaneous use with lines detected by an omni-directional camera. The approach is evaluated in the RoboCup domain and experimental evidence is given for its robustness, accuracy and efficiency, as well as for its capability of global localization. [177] Madelaine Engström, Anders Haraldsson, Tove Mattsson and Minna Salminen-Karlsson. 2003. Studenter genusgranskar sin utbildning: Projekt med elektro- och dataprogrammen och lärarutbildningen vid Linköpings universitet. Technical Report. In series: CUL-rapporter #2003:5. Linköping University Electronic Press. 56 pages. I huvudsak kvinnliga studenter från elektro- och dataprogrammen och lä-rarutbildningen utbildades i genuskunskap och fick i uppdrag att under ett läsår studera sina utbildningar ur ett genusperspektiv gällande inne-håll, kurslitteratur, undervisnings- och examinationsformer samt bemö-tande från lärare och andra studenter. Studenterna från respektive utbild-ningsområde bildade var sin projektgrupp under ledning av en handledare.De huvudsakliga resultaten är dels att de kvinnliga studenterna efter utbildningen i genuskunskap och alla diskussioner ser sina utbildningar på ett nytt sätt, genom att självmant observera och reflektera över förete-elser de inte varit medvetna om. Dels har vi fått ökad kunskap om genus-aspekter i själva utbildningsprogrammen genom de observationer som studenterna gjort under läsåret. Dessutom kan man se projektet som en mall för andra program som man vill studera och genomlysa ur ett ge-nusperspektiv. Ett annat intressant resultat från projektet var bildandet av det kvinnliga nätverket Grace för elektro- och datastudenterna.Rapporten beskriver projektet, dess uppläggning och genomförande, re-sultaten från respektive utbildningsområde och avslutas med en reflektion av projektet och de funna resultaten i ett större perspektiv med jämförelser med resultat från andra undersökningar om genus i högskoleutbildning. [176] Peter Aronsson, Peter Fritzson, Levon Saldamli, Peter Bunus and Kaj Nyström. 2003. Meta Programming and Function Overloading in OpenModelica. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Modelica Conference (November 3-4, Linköping, Sweden). [175] Eva-Lena Lengquist Sandelin, Susanna Monemar, Peter Fritzson and Peter Bunus. 2003. DrModelica - A Web-Based Teaching Environment for Modelica. In Proceedings of the 44th Conference on Simulation and Modeling (SIMS). Malardalen University. ISBN: 91-631-4716-5. This paper states the need for interactive teaching materials for programming languages within the area of modeling and simulation. We propose an interactive teaching material for the modeling language Modelica inspired by existing tutoring systems for Java and Scheme.The purpose of this new teaching material, called DrModelica, is to facilitate the learning of Modelica in a modeling and simulation environment. We have developed two versions of DrModelica, one that is based on Mathematica and another that is intended for the web. With the web version of DrModelica we hope for an increased usage of Modelica. [174] Peter Bunus and Peter Fritzson. 2003. Semi-automatic Fault Localization and Behaviour Verification for Physical System Simulation Models. In In Proceedings 8th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. (Montreal, Canada, October 6-10, 2003). [173] Vadim Engelson, Peter Bunus, Lucian Popescu and Peter Fritzson. 2003. Mechanical CAD with Multibody Dynamic Analysis Based on Modelica Simulation. In SIMS 2003 - 44th Conference on Simulation and Modeling on September 18 -19, 2003 in Västerås. [172] Eva-Lena Lengquist Sandelin, Susanna Monemar, Peter Fritzson and Peter Bunus. 2003. DrModelica - An Interactive Tutoring Environment for Modelica. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Modelica Conference. Modelica Association. This paper states the need for interactive teaching materials for programming languages within the area of modeling and simulation. We propose an interactive teaching material for the modeling language Modelica inspired by existing tutoring systems for Java and Scheme.The purpose of this new teaching material, called DrModelica, is to facilitate the learning of Modelica through an environment that integrates programming, program documentation and visualization. The teaching material is intended to be used for modeling and simulation related courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. [171] Erik Sandewall, Patrick Doherty, Oliver Lemon and Stanley Peters. 2003. Words at the Right Time: Real-Time Dialogues with the WITAS Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. In Proceedings of the 26th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI), pages 52–63. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2821. Springer Verlag. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-39451-8_5. The WITAS project addresses the design of an intelligent, autonomous UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), in our case a helicopter. Its dialogue-system subprojects address the design of a deliberative system for natural-language and graphical dialogue with that robotic UAV. This raises new issues both for dialogue and for reasoning in real time. The following topics have been particularly important for us in various stages of the work in these subprojects: - spatiotemporal reference in the dialogue, including reference to past events and to planned or expected, future events - mixed initiative in the dialogue architecture of a complex system consisting of both dialogue-related components (speech, grammar, etc) and others (simulation, event recognition, interface to robot) and more recently as well - identification of a dialogue manager that is no more complex than what is required by the application - uniform treatment of different types of events, including the robot's own actions, observed events, communication events, and dialogue-oriented deliberation events - a logic of time, action, and spatiotemporal phenomena that facilitates the above. This paper gives a brief overview of the WITAS project as a whole, and then addresses the approaches that have been used and that are presently being considered in the work on two generations of dialogue subsystems. [170] Andrzej Szalas. 2003. On a logical approach to estimating computational complexity of potentially intractable problems. In G. Goos, J. Hartmanis, and J. van Leeuwen, editors, Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory (FCT), pages 423–431. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2751. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-45077-1_39. In the paper we present a purely logical approach to estimating computational complexity of potentially intractable problems. The approach is based on descriptive complexity and second-order quantifier elimination techniques. We illustrate the approach on the case of the transversal hypergraph problem, TRANSHYP, which has attracted a great deal of attention. The complexity of the problem remains unsolved for over twenty years. Given two hypergraphs, G and H, TRANSHYP depends on checking whether G = H-d, where H-d is the transversal hypergraph of H. In the paper we provide a logical characterization of minimal transversals of a given hypergraph and prove that checking whether G subset of or equal to H-d is tractable. For the opposite inclusion the Problem still remains open. However, we interpret the resulting quantifier sequences in terms of determinism and bounded nondeterminism. The results give better upper bounds than those known from the literature, e.g., in the case when hypergraph H, has a sub-logarithmic number of hyperedges and (for the deterministic case) all hyperedges have the cardinality bounded by a function sub-linear wrt maximum of sizes of G and H. [169] Jonas Kvarnström and Martin Magnusson. 2003. TALplanner in the Third International Planning Competition: Extensions and control rules. The journal of artificial intelligence research, 20(??):343–377. AAAI Press. DOI: 10.1613/jair.1189. TALplanner is a forward-chaining planner that relies on domain knowledge in the shape of temporal logic formulas in order to prune irrelevant parts of the search space. TALplanner recently participated in the third International Planning Competition, which had a clear emphasis on increasing the complexity of the problem domains being used as benchmark tests and the expressivity required to represent these domains in a planning system. Like many other planners, TALplanner had support for some but not all aspects of this increase in expressivity, and a number of changes to the planner were required. After a short introduction to TALplanner, this article describes some of the changes that were made before and during the competition. We also describe the process of introducing suitable domain knowledge for several of the competition domains. [168] Patrick Doherty, A Skowron, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2003. 1st International Workshop on Knowledge Representation and Approximate Reasoning (KR&AR). [167] E Madalinska-Bugaj and Witold Lukaszewicz. 2003. Formalizing defeasible logic in CAKE. Fundamenta Informaticae, 57(2-3):193–213. IOS Press. Due to its efficiency, defeasible logic is one of the most interesting non-monotonic formalisms. Unfortunately, the logic has one major limitation: it does not properly deal with cyclic defeasible rules. In this paper, we provide a new variant of defeasible logic, using CAKE method. The resulting formalism is tractable and properly deals with circular defeasible rules. [166] Patrick Doherty, M Grabowski, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2003. Towards a framework for approximate ontologies. Fundamenta Informaticae, 57(2-4):147–165. IOS Press. Currently, there is a great deal of interest in developing tools for the generation and use of ontologies on the WWW. These knowledge structures are considered essential to the success of the semantic web, the next phase in the evolution of the WWW. Much recent work with ontologies assumes that the concepts used as building blocks are crisp as opposed to approximate. It is a premise of this paper that approximate concepts and ontologies will become increasingly more important as the semantic web becomes a reality. We propose a framework for specifying, generating and using approximate ontologies. More specifically, (1) a formal framework for defining approximate concepts, ontologies and operations on approximate concepts and ontologies is presented. The framework is based on intuitions from rough set theory, (2) algorithms for automatically generating approximate ontologies from traditional crisp ontologies or from large data sets together with additional knowledge are presented. The knowledge will generally be related to similarity measurements between individual objects in the data sets, or constraints of a logical nature which rule out particular constellations of concepts and dependencies in generated ontologies. The techniques for generating approximate ontologies are parameterizable. The paper provides specific instantiations and examples. [165] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2003. On mutual understanding among communicating agents. In B. Dunin-Keplicz and R. Verbrugge, editors, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Multi-Agent Systems (FAMAS), pages 83–97. [164] Patrick Doherty and et al. 2003. 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium Series. The AI Magazine, 24(3):131–140. AAAI Press. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science, presented the 2003 Spring Symposium Series, Monday through Wednesday, 24–26 March 2003, at Stanford University. The titles of the eight symposia were Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management, Computational Synthesis: From Basic Building Blocks to High- Level Functions, Foundations and Applications of Spatiotemporal Reasoning (FASTR), Human Interaction with Autonomous Systems in Complex Environments, Intelligent Multimedia Knowledge Management, Logical Formalization of Commonsense Reasoning, Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialogue, and New Directions in Question-Answering Motivation. [163] Igor S. Pandzic, Jörgen Ahlberg, Mariusz Wzorek, Piotr Rudol and Miran Mosmondor. 2003. Faces Everywhere: Towards Ubiquitous Production and Delivery of Face Animation. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM), pages 49–56. In series: Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings #11. Linköping University Electronic Press. Link: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/011/010/ecp0110... While face animation is still considered one of the toughesttasks in computer animation, its potential application range israpidly moving from the classical field of film production intogames, communications, news delivery and commerce. Tosupport such novel applications, it is important to enableproduction and delivery of face animation on a wide range ofplatforms, from high-end animation systems to the web, gameconsoles and mobile phones. Our goal is to offer a frameworkof tools interconnected by standard formats and protocols andcapable of supporting any imaginable application involvingface animation with the desired level of animation quality,automatic production wherever it is possible, and delivery ona wide range of platforms. While this is clearly an ongoingtask, we present the current state of development along withseveral case studies showing that a wide range of applicationsis already enabled. [162] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2003. High-level design of WWW servers in Allegro Common Lisp. In Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference (ILC). When invoking a function or a procedure in an ordinary programming language, it is normally assumed that the arguments may be given as composite expressions, and that they are not restricted to atomic constants or variable symbols. However, although active web pages in HTML-based web servers can be viewed as a kind of procedures, they do not enjoy the same flexibility. The present paper reports on a software package that extends the embedded web server in the ACL (Allegro Common Lisp) system and that provides it with the kind of functional flavor just described. In passing, the software also adds a number of other convenience measures to the LHTML (Lisp-encoded HTML) of the ACL server. [161] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2003. A software architecture for AI systems based on self-modifying software individuals. In Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference (ILC). The Software Individuals Architecture (SIA) is a framework fordefining software systems that are capable of self-modification and of reproductionon the level of an interpretive programming language. In abstractterms, a self-modifying system is a labelled tree containing scripts at someof its nodes; these scripts are effectively programs. A computation in sucha system executes a specific script. In doing so it maintains a local computationalstate, but it also uses and updates the labelled tree. The labelledtree, the local computational state, and the command language used for thescripts are all designed in such a way as to support self-modification andreproduction in a structured and orderly fashion.We have defined a practical system of this kind both on an abstract andformal level and as an implementation using Lisp as the host language. Thisarchitecture has been used as a platform for several applications, including inparticular the speech and natural-language dialogue system for an intelligentautonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the WITAS project. Thearchitecture design has been revised repeatedly as a result of using it for thisapplication as well as several others. [160] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2003. Tolerance Spaces and Approximative Representational Structures. In Proceedings of the 26th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI), pages 475–489. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2821. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-39451-8_35. In traditional approaches to knowledge representation, notions such as tolerance measures on data, distance between objects or individuals, and similarity measures between primitive and complex data structures are rarely considered. There is often a need to use tolerance and similarity measures in processes of data and knowledge abstraction because many complex systems which have knowledge representation components such as robots or software agents receive and process data which is incomplete, noisy, approximative and uncertain. This paper presents a framework for recursively constructing arbitrarily complex knowledge structures which may be compared for similarity, distance and approximativeness. It integrates nicely with more traditional knowledge representation techniques and attempts to bridge a gap between approximate and crisp knowledge representation. It can be viewed in part as a generalization of approximate reasoning techniques used in rough set theory. The strategy that will be used is to define tolerance and distance measures on the value sets associated with attributes or primitive data domains associated with particular applications. These tolerance and distance measures will be induced through the different levels of data and knowledge abstraction in complex representational structures. Once the tolerance and similarity measures are in place, an important structuring generalization can be made where the idea of a tolerance space is introduced. Use of these ideas is exemplified using two application domains related to sensor modeling and communication between agents. [159] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2003. Information Granules for Intelligent Knowledge Structures. In Guoyin Wang, Qing Liu, Yiyu Yao, Andrzej Skowron, editors, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Rough Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Data Mining and Granular Computing (RSFDGrC), pages 405–412. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2639. Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-14040-5. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-39205-X_68. The premise of this paper is that the acquisition, aggregation, merging and use of information requires some new ideas, tools and techniques which can simplify the construction, analysis and use of what we call ephemeral knowledge structures. Ephemeral knowledge structures are used and constructed by granular agents. Each agent contains its own granular information structure and granular information structures of agents can be combined together. The main concept considered in this paper is an information granule. An information granule is a concise conceptual unit that can be integrated into a larger information infrastructure consisting of other information granules and dependencies between them. The novelty of this paper is that it provides a concise and formal definition of a particular view of information granule and its associated operators, as required in advanced knowledge representation applications. [158] Patrik Haslum and Ulrich Scholz. 2003. Domain Knowledge in Planning: Representation and Use. In Proceedings of the ICAPS workshop on PDDL, pages 69–78. Planning systems rely on knowledge about the problems they have to solve: The problem description and in many cases advice on how to find a solution. This paper is concerned with a third kind of knowledge which we term domain knowledge: Information about the problem that is produced by one component of the planner and used for advice by another. We first distinguish domain knowledge from the problem description and from advice, and argue for the advantages of the explict use of domain knowledge. Then we identify three classes of domain knowledge for which these advantages are most apparent and define a language, DKEL, to represent these classes. DKEL is designed as an extension to PDDL. [157] Anders Arpteg. 2003. Adaptive Semi-structured Information Extraction. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #1000. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 85 pages. ISBN: 91-7373-589-2. Note: Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2002:73. The number of domains and tasks where information extraction tools can be used needs to be increased. One way to reach this goal is to construct user-driven information extraction systems where novice users are able to adapt them to new domains and tasks. To accomplish this goal, the systems need to become more intelligent and able to learn to extract information without need of expert skills or time-consuming work from the user.The type of information extraction system that is in focus for this thesis is semistructural information extraction. The term semi-structural refers to documents that not only contain natural language text but also additional structural information. The typical application is information extraction from World Wide Web hypertext documents. By making effective use of not only the link structure but also the structural information within each such document, user-driven extraction systems with high performance can be built.The extraction process contains several steps where different types of techniques are used. Examples of such types of techniques are those that take advantage of structural, pure syntactic, linguistic, and semantic information. The first step that is in focus for this thesis is the navigation step that takes advantage of the structural information. It is only one part of a complete extraction system, but it is an important part. The use of reinforcement learning algorithms for the navigation step can make the adaptation of the system to new tasks and domains more user-driven. The advantage of using reinforcement learning techniques is that the extraction agent can efficiently learn from its own experience without need for intensive user interactions.An agent-oriented system was designed to evaluate the approach suggested in this thesis. Initial experiments showed that the training of the navigation step and the approach of the system was promising. However, additional components need to be included in the system before it becomes a fully-fledged user-driven system. 2002 [156] Alexander Kleiner, M. Dietl and Bernhard Nebel. 2002. Towards a Life-Long Learning Soccer Agent. In In RoboCup 2002: Robot Soccer World Cup VI, pages 126–134. One problem in robotic soccer (and in robotics in general) is to adapt skills and the overall behavior to a changing environment and to hardware improvements. We applied hierarchical reinforcement learning in an SMDP framework learning on all levels simultaneously. As our experiments show, learning simultaneously on the skill level and on the skill selection level is advantageous since it allows for a smooth adaption to a changing environment. Furthermore, the skills we trained turn also out to be quite competitive when run on the real robotic players of the players of our CS Freiburg team. [155] T. Weigel, J. -S Gutmann, M. Dietl, Alexander Kleiner and B. Nebel. 2002. CS Freiburg: Coordinating Robots for Successful Soccer Playing. IEEE transactions on robotics and automation, 18(5):685–699. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/TRA.2002.804041. Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain because many different research areas have to be addressed in order to create a successful team of robot players. This paper presents the CS Freiburg team, the winner in the middle size league at RoboCup 1998, 2000 and 2001. The paper focuses on multi-agent coordination for both perception and action. The contributions of this work are new methods for tracking ball and players observed by multiple robots, team coordination methods for strategic team formation and dynamic role assignment, a rich set of basic skills allowing to respond to large range of situations in an appropriate way, an action selection method based on behavior networks as well as a method to learn the skills and their selection. As demonstrated by evaluations of the different methods and by the success of the team, these methods permit the creation of a multi-robot group, which is able to play soccer successfully. In addition, the developed methods promise to advance the state of the art in the multi-robot field. [154] Levon Saldamli, Peter Fritzson, Peter Aronsson, Peter Bunus, Vadim Engelson, Henrik Johansson and Andreas Karström. 2002. The Open Source Modelica Project. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Modelica Conference. Modelica Association. Note: Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, March 18-19, 2002 [153] Peter Aronsson, Peter Fritzson, Levon Saldamli and Peter Bunus. 2002. Incremental declaration handling in Open Source Modelica. In Scandinavian Simulation Conference (SIMS), September 2002, Oulu, Finland.. [152] Patrik Haslum. 2002. Partial State Progression: An Extension to the Bacchus-Kabanza Algorithm, with Applications to Prediction and MITL Consistency. In Proceedings of the AIPS 2002 workshop on Planning via Model Checking. [151] Jonas Kvarnström. 2002. Applying Domain Analysis Techniques for Domain-Dependent Control in TALplanner. In Malik Ghallab, Joachim Hertzberg, and Paolo Traverso, editors, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS). AAAI Press. ISBN: 0-57735-142-8. DOI: 10.3233/978-1-60750-606-5-341. A number of current planners make use of automatic domain analysis techniques to extract information such as state invariants or necessary goal orderings from a planning domain. There are also planners that allow the user to explicitly specify additional information intended to improve performance. One such planner is TALplanner, which allows the use of domain-dependent temporal control formulas for pruning a forward-chaining search tree. This leads to the question of how these two approaches can be combined. In this paper we show how to make use of automatically generated state invariants to improve the performance of testing control formulas. We also develop a new technique for analyzing control rules relative to control formulas and show how this often allows the planner to automatically strengthen the preconditions of the operators, thereby reducing time complexity and improving the performance of TALplanner by a factor of up to 400 for the largest problems from the AIPS-2000 competition. [150] Erik Skarman and AB Saab. 2002. EEG waves as chaotic self-oscillations. In International Journal of Psychophysiology, pages 138–138. [149] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2002. Use of cognitive robotics logic in a double helix architecture for autonomous systems. In Advances in Plan-Based Control of Robotic Agents: Revised Papers from the International Seminar at Dagstuhl Castle, pages 226–248. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2466. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-37724-7_14. This paper addresses the two-way relation between the architecture for cognitive robots on one hand, and a logic of action and change that is adapted to the needs of such robots on the other hand. The relation goes both ways: the logic is used within the architecture, but we also propose that an abstract model of the cognitive robot architecture shall be used for defining the semantics of the logic. For this purpose, we describe a novel architecture called the Double Helix Architecture which, unlike earlier proposals, emphasizes a precise account of the metric discrete timeline and the computational processes that take place along that timeline. The computational model of the Double Helix Architecture corresponds to the semantics of the logic being used, namely the author's Cognitive Robotics Logic which is based on the 'Features and Fluents' theory. [148] Andrzej Szalas. 2002. Second-order quantifier elimination in modal contexts. In Sergio Flesca, Sergio Greco, Nicola Leone, Giovambattista Ianni, editors, Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA), pages 223–232. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #2424. Springer. ISBN: 978-354044190-8. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-45757-7_19. Second-order quantifier elimination in the context of classical logic emerged as a powerful technique in many applications, including the correspondence theory, relational databases, deductive and knowledge databases, knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning and approximate reasoning. In the current paper we generalize the result of [19] by allowing modal operators. This allows us to provide a unifying framework for many applications, that require the use of intensional concepts. Examples of applications of the technique in AI are also provided. [147] John-Jules Meyer and Patrick Doherty. 2002. Preferential Action Semantics. In John-Jules Ch Meyer; Jan Treur, editor, Handbook of Defeasible Reasoning and Uncertainty Management Systems: Volume 7:: Agent-Based Defeasible Control in Dynamic Environments. In series: Handbook of Defeasible Reasoning and Uncertainty Management Systems #7. Kluwer. ISBN: 978-1-4020-0834-4, 14-02-0-0834-1. find book in another country/hitta boken i ett annat land: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Handboo... This last volume of the Handbook of Defeasible Reasoning and Uncertainty Management Systems is - together with Volume 6 - devoted to the topics Reasoning and Dynamics, covering both the topics of \"Dynamics of Reasoning,\" where reasoning is viewed as a process, and \"Reasoning about Dynamics,\" which must be understood as pertaining to how both designers of, and agents within dynamic systems may reason about these systems. The present volume presents work done in this context and is more focused on \"reasoning about dynamics,\" viz. how (human and artificial) agents reason about (systems in) dynamic environments in order to control them. In particular modelling frameworks and generic agent models for modelling these dynamic systems and formal approaches to these systems such as logics for agents and formal means to reason about agent-based and compositional systems, and action & change more in general are considered. [146] Klas Nordberg, Patrick Doherty, Gunnar Farnebäck, Per-Erik Forssén, Gösta Granlund, Anders Moe and Johan Wiklund. 2002. Vision for a UAV helicopter. In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Workshop on Aerial Robotics: Lausanne, Switzerland. This paper presents and overview of the basic and applied research carried out by the Computer Vision Laboratory, Linköping University, in the WITAS UAV Project. This work includes customizing and redesigning vision methods to fit the particular needs and restrictions imposed by the UAV platform, e.g., for low-level vision, motion estimation, navigation, and tracking. It also includes a new learning structure for association of perception-action activations, and a runtime system for implementation and execution of vision algorithms. The paper contains also a brief introduction to the WITAS UAV Project. [145] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2002. CAKE: A computer aided knowledge engineering technique. In Frank van Harmelen, editor, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence,2002, pages 220–224. IOS Press. Introduction: Logic engineering often involves the development of modeling tools and inference mechanisms (both standard and non-standard) which are targeted for use in practical applications where expressiveness in representation must be traded off for efficiency in use. Some representative examples of such applications would be the structuring and querying of knowledge on the semantic web, or the representation and querying of epistemic states used with softbots, robots or smart devices. In these application areas, declarative representations of knowledge enhance the functionality of such systems and also provide a basis for insuring the pragmatic properties of modularity and incremental composition. In addition, the mechanisms developed should be tractable, but at the same time, expressive enough to represent such aspects as default reasoning, or approximate or incomplete representations of the environments in which the entities in question are embedded or used, be they virtual or actual. [...] [144] Per Andersson, Krzysztof Kuchcinski, Klas Nordberg and Patrick Doherty. 2002. Integrating a computational model and a run time system for image processing on a UAV. In Euromicro Symposium on Digital System Design (DSD), pages 102–109. DOI: 10.1109/DSD.2002.1115357. Recently substantial research has been devoted to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). One of a UAV's most demanding subsystem is vision. The vision subsystem must dynamically combine different algorithms as the UAVs goal and surrounding change. To fully utilize the available hardware, a run time system must be able to vary the quality and the size of regions the algorithms are applied to, as the number of image processing tasks changes. To allow this the run time system and the underlying computational model must be integrated. In this paper we present a computational model suitable for integration with a run time system. The computational model is called Image Processing Data Flow Graph (IP-DFG). IP-DFG has been developed for modeling of complex image processing algorithms. IP-DFG is based on data flow graphs, but has been extended with hierarchy and new rules for token consumption, which makes the computational model more flexible and more suitable for human interaction. In this paper we also show that IP-DFGs are suitable for modelling expressions, including data dependent decisions and iterations, which are common in complex image processing algorithms. [143] Peter Bunus. 2002. Debugging and Structural Analysis of Declarative Equation-Based Languages. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #964. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 156 pages. ISBN: 91-7373-382-2. Note: Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2002:37. A significant part of the software development effort is spent on detecting deviations between software implementations and specifications, and subsequently locating the sources of such errors. This thesis illustrates that is possible to identify a significant number of errors during static analysis of declarative object-oriented equation-based modeling languages that are typically used for system modeling and simulation. Detecting anomalies in the source code without actually solving the underlying system of equations provides a significant advantage: a modeling error can be corrected before trying to get the model compiled or embarking on a computationally expensive symbolic or numerical solution process. The overall objective of this work is to demonstrate that debugging based on static analysis techniques can considerably improve the error location and error correcting process when modeling with equation-based languages.A new method is proposed for debugging of over- and under-constrained systems of equations. The improved approach described in this thesis is to perform the debugging process on the flattened intermediate form of the source code and to use filtering criteria generated from program annotations and from the translation rules. Each time when an error is detected in the intermediate code and the error fixing solution is elaborated, the debugger queries for the original source code before presenting any information to the user. In this way, the user is exposed to the original language source code and not burdened with additional information from the translation process or required to inspect the intermediate code.We present the design and implementation of debugging kernel prototypes, tightly integrated with the core of the optimizer module of a Modelica compiler, including details of the novel framework required for automatic debugging of equation-based languages.This thesis establishes that structural static analysis performed on the underlying system of equations from object-oriented mathematical models can effectively be used to statically debug real Modelica programs. Most of our conclusions developed in this thesis are also valid for other equation-based modeling languages. [142] Patrik Haslum. 2002. Prediction as a Knowledge Representation Problem: A Case Study in Model Design. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #942. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 106 pages. ISBN: 91-7373-331-8. Note: Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2002:15. Link to Ph.D. Thesis: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:... The WITAS project aims to develop technologies to enable an Unmanned Airial Vehicle (UAV) to operate autonomously and intelligently, in applications such as traffic surveillance and remote photogrammetry. Many of the necessary control and reasoning tasks, e.g. state estimation, reidentification, planning and diagnosis, involve prediction as an important component. Prediction relies on models, and such models can take a variety of forms. Model design involves many choices with many alternatives for each choice, and each alternative carries advantages and disadvantages that may be far from obvious. In spite of this, and of the important role of prediction in so many areas, the problem of predictive model design is rarely studied on its own.In this thesis, we examine a range of applications involving prediction and try to extract a set of choices and alternatives for model design. As a case study, we then develop, evaluate and compare two different model designs for a specific prediction problem encountered in the WITAS UAV project. The problem is to predict the movements of a vehicle travelling in a traffic network. The main difficulty is that uncertainty in predictions is very high, du to two factors: predictions have to be made on a relatively large time scale, and we have very little information about the specific vehicle in question. To counter uncertainty, as much use as possible must be made of knowledge about traffic in general, which puts emphasis on the knowledge representation aspect of the predictive model design.The two mode design we develop differ mainly in how they represent uncertainty: the first uses coarse, schema-based representation of likelihood, while the second, a Markov model, uses probability. Preliminary experiments indicate that the second design has better computational properties, but also some drawbacks: model construction is data intensive and the resulting models are somewhat opaque. [141] Bourhane Kadmiry. 2002. Fuzzy Control for an Unmanned Helicopter. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #938. Institutionen för datavetenskap. 108 pages. ISBN: 91-7373-313-X. Note: Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2002:11. The format of the electronic version of this thesis differs slightly from the printed one: this is due mainly to font compatibility. The figures and body of the thesis are remaining unchanged. The overall objective of the Wallenberg Laboratory for Information Technology and Autonomous Systems (WITAS) at Linköping University is the development of an intelligent command and control system, containing vision sensors, which supports the operation of a unmanned air vehicle (UAV) in both semi- and full-autonomy modes. One of the UAV platforms of choice is the APID-MK3 unmanned helicopter, by Scandicraft Systems AB. The intended operational environment is over widely varying geographical terrain with traffic networks and vehicle interaction of variable complexity, speed, and density.The present version of APID-MK3 is capable of autonomous take-off, landing, and hovering as well as of autonomously executing pre-defined, point-to-point flight where the latter is executed at low-speed. This is enough for performing missions like site mapping and surveillance, and communications, but for the above mentioned operational environment higher speeds are desired. In this context, the goal of this thesis is to explore the possibilities for achieving stable ‘‘aggressive’’ manoeuvrability at high-speeds, and test a variety of control solutions in the APID-MK3 simulation environment.The objective of achieving ‘‘aggressive’’ manoeuvrability concerns the design of attitude/velocity/position controllers which act on much larger ranges of the body attitude angles, by utilizing the full range of the rotor attitude angles. In this context, a flight controller should achieve tracking of curvilinear trajectories at relatively high speeds in a robust, w.r.t. external disturbances, manner. Take-off and landing are not considered here since APIDMK3 has already have dedicated control modules that realize these flight modes.With this goal in mind, we present the design of two different types of flight controllers: a fuzzy controller and a gradient descent method based controller. Common to both are model based design, the use of nonlinear control approaches, and an inner- and outer-loop control scheme. The performance of these controllers is tested in simulation using the nonlinear model of APID-MK3. 2001 [140] Erik Sandewall. 2001. On the Design of Software Individuals. Electronic Transactions on Artifical Intelligence, 5(??):??–??. Linköpings Universitet. [139] Jaroslaw Kachniarz and Andrzej Szalas. 2001. On a Static Approach to Verification of Integrity Constraints in Relational Databases. In Eva Orlowska, Andrzej Szalas, editors, Relational Methods for Computer Science Applications, pages 97–109. In series: Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing #65. Springer Physica-Verlag. ISBN: 3-7908-1365-6. Find book at a Swedish library/Hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/hitlist?d=libris&q=3... Find book in another country/Hitta boken i ett annat land: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=3-7908-... [138] Ewa Orlowska and Andrzej Szalas. 2001. Relational Methods for Computer Science Applications. In series: Studies in Fuziness and Soft Computing #??. Springer Physica Verlag. 297 pages. ISBN: 37-9081-365-6, 978-37-9081-365-4. Find book in another country/Hitta boken i ett annat land: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=37-9081... This volume addresses all current aspects of relational methods and their applications in computer science. It presents a broad variety of fields and issues in which theories of relations provide conceptual or technical tools. The contributions address such subjects as relational methods in programming, relational constraints, relational methods in linguistics and spatial reasoning, relational modelling of uncertainty. All contributions provide the readers with new and original developments in the respective fields.The reader thus gets an interdisciplinary spectrum of the state of the art of relational methods and implementation-oriented solutions of problems related to these areas [137] Lars Karlsson. 2001. Conditional Progressive Planning: A Preliminary Report. In Proceedings of the Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), pages 90–100. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #66. IOS Press. [136] T. Weigel, Alexander Kleiner, F. Diesch, M. Dietl, J. -S Gutmann, B. Nebel, P. Stiegeler and B. Szerbakowski. 2001. CS Freiburg 2001. In RoboCup 2001 : Robot Soccer World Cup V, pages 26–38. The CS Freiburg team has become F2000 champion the third time in the history of RoboCup. The success of our team can probably be attributed to its robust sensor interpretation and its team play. In this paper, we will focus on new developments in our vision system, in our path planner, and in the cooperation component. [135] Joakim Gustafsson. 2001. Object-oriented Reasoning about Action and Change. In H.H. Lund, B. Mayoh, J. Perram, editors, Proceedings of the Seventh Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), pages 53–64. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #66. IOS Press. ISBN: 1-58603-161-9. As the scope of logics of action and change continues to increase and powerful research tools are developed, it becomes possible to model larger and more complex scenarios. Unfortunately the scenarios become harder to read and difficult to modify and debug with increasing size and complexity. These problems have been overlooked in the action and change community due to the fact that only smaller toy problems are considered. Sound modeling methodology is as essential as the primitives of the modeling language. The object-oriented paradigm is one structuring mechanism that alleviates these problems and provides a systematic means of scenario construction. The topic of this paper is to demonstrate how many ideas from the object orientation paradigm can be used when reasoning about action and change, we show this by integrating the technique directly in an existing logic of action and change without any modification to the underlying logical language or semantics. 1 [134] Bourhane Kadmiry, Rainer Palm and Dimiter Driankov. 2001. Autonomous Helicopter Control Using Gradient Descent Optimization Method. In Proceedings of the Asian Conference on Robotic & Automation (ACRA). [133] Bourhane Kadmiry, Pontus Bergsten and Dimiter Driankov. 2001. Autonomous Helicopter Control Using Fuzzy-Gain Scheduling. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotic & Automation (ICRA), pages 2980–2985. IEEE conference proceedings. ISBN: 0-7803-6576-3. DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.2001.933074. The work reported in the paper is aimed at achieving aggressive manoeuvrability for an unmanned helicopter APID MK-III by Scandicraft AB in Sweden. The manoeuvrability problem is treated at the level of attitude (pitch, roll, yaw) and the aim is to achieve stabilization of the attitude angles within much larger ranges than currently available. We present a fuzzy gain scheduling control approach based on two different types of Iinearization of the original nonlinear APID MK-III model. The performance of the fuzzy gain scheduled controllers is evaluated in simulation and shows that they are effective means for achieving the desired robust manoeuvrability. [132] Bourhane Kadmiry and Dimiter Driankov. 2001. Fuzzy Control of an Autonomous Helicopter. In Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA) World Congress, pages 2797–2802. IEEE Computer Society. ISBN: 0-7803-7078-3. DOI: 10.1109/NAFIPS.2001.943669. This work presents a horizontal velocity controller for the unmanned helicopter APID MK-III developed by Scandicraft AB in Sweden. We use a novel approach to the design consisting of two steps: 1) Mamdani-type of fuzzy rules to compute each of the desired horizontal velocity corresponding to the desired values for the attitude angles and the main rotor collective pitch; and 2) a Takagi-Sugeno controller is used to regulate the attitude angles so that the helicopter achieves its desired horizontal velocities at a desired altitude. The performance of the combined linguistic/model-based controller is evaluated in simulation and shows that the proposed design method achieves its intended purpose [131] Bourhane Kadmiry and Dimiter Driankov. 2001. Autonomous Helicopter Control using Linguistic and Model-Based Fuzzy Control. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control (CCA/ISIC), pages 348–352. ISBN: 0-7803-6722-7. DOI: 10.1109/ISIC.2001.971534. The paper presents the design of a horizontal velocity controller for the unmanned helicopter APID MK-III developed by Scandicraft AB in Sweden. The controller is able of regulating high horizontal velocities via stabilization of the attitude angles within much larger ranges than currently available. We use a novel approach to the design consisting of two steps: 1) a Mamdani-type of a fuzzy rules are used to compute for each desired horizontal velocity the corresponding desired values for the attitude angles and the main rotor collective pitch; and 2) using a nonlinear model of the altitude and attitude dynamics, a Takagi-Sugeno controller is used to regulate the attitude angles so that the helicopter achieves its desired horizontal velocities at a desired altitude. According to our knowledge this is the first time when a combination of linguistic and model-based fuzzy control is used for the control of a complicated plant such as an autonomous helicopter. The performance of the combined linguistic/model-based controllers is evaluated in simulation and shows that the proposed design method achieves its intended purpose [130] Fredrik Heintz, Johan Kummeneje and Paul Scerri. 2001. Using Simulated RoboCup to Teach AI in Undergraduate Education. In Proceedings of the 7th Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), pages 13–21. In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #66. IOS Press. ISBN: 1-58603-161-9. In this paper we argue that RoboCup is a useful tool for the teaching of AI in undergraduate education. We provide case studies, from two Swedish universities, of how RoboCup based AI courses can be implemented using a problem based approach. Although the courses were successful there are significant areas for improvement. Firstly, to help students cope with the complexity of the domain we developed RoboSoc, a general software framework for developing simulated RoboCup agents. Secondly, we propose creating close co-operation between the teachers and researchers at Scandinavian Universities with the aim of increasing the motivation of both students and teachers by providing accessible information and competence. [129] Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty. 2001. Chronicle Recognition in the WITAS UAV Project: A Preliminary Report. In Proceedings of the Swedish AI Society Workshop. [128] Patrik Haslum. 2001. Models for Prediction. In Proceedings of the IJCAI 2001 workshop on Planning under Uncertainty and Incomplete Information (PRO-2). Prediction is found to be a part of many more complex reasoning problems, e.g. state estimation, planning and diagnosis. In spite of this, the prediction problem is rarely studied on its own. Yet there appears to be a wide range of choices for the design of the central component in a solution to this problem, the predictive model. We examine some of the alternatives and, as a case study, present two different solutions to a specific prediction problem that we have encountered in the WITAS UAV project. [127] Patrik Haslum and Héctor Geffner. 2001. Heuristic Planning with Time and Resources. In Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Planning (ECP). We present an algorithm for planning with time and resources based on heuristic search. The algorithm minimizes makespan using an admissible heuristic derived automatically from the problem instance. Estimators for resource consumption are derived in the same way. The goals are twofold: to show the flexibility of the heuristic search approach to planning and to develop a planner that combines expressivity and performance. Two main issues are the definition of regression in a temporal setting and the definition of the heuristic estimating completion time. A number of experiments are presented for assessing the performance of the resulting planner. [126] Joakim Gustafsson and Jonas Kvarnström. 2001. Elaboration Tolerance through Object-Orientation. In Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning (CommonSense). Although many formalisms for reasoning about action and change have been proposed in the literature, their semantic adequacy has primarily been tested using tiny domains that highlight some particular aspect or problem. However, since some of the classical problems are completely or partially solved and since powerful tools are available, it is now necessary to start modeling more complex domains. This paper presents a methodology for handling such domains in a systematic manner using an object-oriented framework and provides several examples of the elaboration tolerance exhibited by the resulting models. [125] Patrick Doherty and Jonas Kvarnström. 2001. TALPLANNER - A temporal logic-based planner. The AI Magazine, 22(3):95–102. AAAI Press. TALPLANNER is a forward-chaining planner that utilizes domain-dependent knowledge to control search in the state space generated by action invocation. The domain-dependent control knowledge, background knowledge, plans, and goals are all represented, using,formulas in, a temporal logic called TAL, which has been developed independently as a formalism for specifying agent narratives and reasoning about them. In the Fifth International Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling Conference planning competition, TALPLANNER exhibited impressive performance, winning the Outstanding Performance Award in the Domain-Dependent Planning Competition. In this article, we provide an overview of TALPLANNER. [124] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2001. Computing strongest necessary and weakest sufficient conditions of first-order formulas. In 17th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,2001. Morgan Kaufmann. [123] Marcus Bjäreland. 2001. Model-based execution monitoring. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #688. Linköpings universitet. 153 pages. ISBN: 91-7373-016-5. The task of monitoring the execution of a software-based controller in order to detect, classify, and recover from discrepancies between the actual effects of control actions and the effects predicted by a model, is the topic of this thesis. Model-based execution monitoring is proposed as a technique for increasing the safety and optimality of operation of large and complex industrial process controllers, and of controllers operating in complex and unpredictable environments (such as unmanned aerial vehicles).In this thesis we study various aspects of model-based execution monitoring, including the following:The relation between previous approaches to execution monitoring in Control Theory, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science is studied and a common conceptual framework for design and analysis is proposed.An existing execution monitoring paradigm, ontological control, is generalized and extended. We also present a prototype implementation of ontological control with a first set of experimental results where the prototype is applied to an actual industrial process control system: The ABB STRESSOMETER cold mill flatness control system.A second execution monitoring paradigm, stability-based execution monitoring, is introduced, inspired by the vast amount of work on the \"stability\" notion in Control Theory and Computer Science.Finally, the two paradigms are applied in two different frameworks. First, in the \"hybrid automata\" framework, which is a state-of-the-art formal modeling framework for hybrid (that is, discrete+continuous) systems, and secondly, in the logical framework of GOLOG and the Situation Calculus. [122] Joakim Gustafsson. 2001. Extending temporal action logic. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #689. Linköpings universitet. 218 pages. ISBN: 91-7373-017-3. An autonomous agent operating in a dynamical environment must be able to perform several \"intelligent\" tasks, such as learning about the environment, planning its actions and reasoning about the effects of the chosen actions. For this purpose, it is vital that the agent has a coherent, expressive, and well understood means of representing its knowledge about the world.Traditionally, all knowledge about the dynamics of the modeled world has been represented in complex and detailed action descriptions. The first contribution of this thesis is the introduction of domain constraints in TAL, allowing a more modular representation of certain kinds of knowledge.The second contribution is a systematic method of modeling different types of conflict handling that can arise in the context of concurrent actions. A new type of fluent, called influence, is introduced as a carrier from cause to actual effect. Domain constraints govern how influences interact with ordinary fluents. Conflicts can be modeled in a number of different ways depending on the nature of the interaction.A fundamental property of many dynamical systems is that the effects of actions can occur with some delay. We discuss how delayed effects can be modeled in TAL using the mechanisms previously used for concurrent actions, and consider a range of possible interactions between the delayed effects of an action and later occurring actions.In order to model larger and more complex domains, a sound modeling methodology is essential. We demonstrate how many ideas from the object-oriented paradigm can be used when reasoning about action and change. These ideas are used both to construct a framework for high level control objects and to illustrate how complex domains can be modeled in an elaboration tolerant manner. 2000 [121] Mark S Frankel, Roger Elliott, Martin Blume, Jean-Manuel Bourgois, Bernt Hugenholtz, Mats G. Lindquist, Sally Morris and Erik Sandewall. 2000. Defining and Certifying Electronic Publication in Science. Learned Publishing, 13(4):251–258. Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. Link to article: http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/caisor/archive... [120] Jaroslaw Kachniarz and Andrzej Szalas. 2000. Algorithms based on Symbolic Transformations of Logical Formulas in the RDL Language. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Applications of Computer Science in Mathematics and Economy, pages 101–115. WSIiE, Olsztyn, Poland. [119] Jaroslaw Kachniarz and Andrzej Szalas. 2000. On Rule-Based Approach to the Construction of Logical Transformers. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Rule-Based Programming (RULE), pages 57–71. Springer Physica-Verlag. [118] Alexander Kleiner, Bernadette Sharp and Oliver Bittel. 2000. Self Organising Maps for Value Estimation to Solve Reinforcement Learning Tasks. In Proc. of the 2nd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2000), pages 74–83. Reinforcement learning has been applied recently more and more for the optimisation of agent behaviours. This approach became popular due to its adaptive and unsupervised learning process. One of the key ideas of this approach is to estimate the value of agent states. For huge state spaces however, it is difficult to implement this approach. As a result, various models were proposed which make use of function approximators, such as neural networks, to solve this problem. This paper focuses on an implementation of value estimation with a particular class of neural networks, known as self organizing maps. Experiments with an agent moving in a gridworld and the autonomous robot Khepera have been carried out to show the benefit of our approach. The results clearly show that the conventional approach, done by an implementation of a look-up table to represent the value function, can be out performed in terms of memory usage and convergence speed. [117] Alexander Kleiner and Bernadette Sharp. 2000. A New Algorithm for Learning Bayesian Classifiers from Data. In Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, pages 191–197. We introduce a new algorithm for the induction of classifiers from data, based on Bayesian networks. Basically this problem has already been examined from two perspectives: first, the induction of classifiers by learning algorithms for Bayesian networks, second, the induction of classifiers based on the naive Bayesian classifier. Our approach is located between these two perspectives; it eliminates the disadvantages of both while exploiting their advantages. In contrast to recently appeared refinements of the naive Bayes classifier, which captures single correlations in the data, we have developed an approach which captures multiple correlations and furthermore does a trade-off between complexity and accuracy. In this paper we evaluate the implementation of our approach with data sets from the machine learning repository and data sets artificially generated by Bayesian networks. [116] Marcus Bjäreland and George Fodor. 2000. Execution monitoring of industrial process controllers: an application of Ontological Control. In Prooceedings of the 4th Symposium on Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety for Technical Systems (SAFEPROCESS '00). [115] Mutsumi Nakamura, Chitta Baral and Marcus Bjäreland. 2000. Maintainability: a weaker stabilizability-like notion for high level control of agents. In Proceedings of the 17th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages 62–66. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-0-262-51112-4, 978-1-57735-272-3. The goal of most agents is not just to reach a goal state, but rather also (or alternatively) to put restrictions on its trajectory, in terms of states it must avoid and goals that it must ‘maintain’. This is analogous to the notions of ‘safety’ and ‘stability’ in the discrete event systems and temporal logic community. In this paper we argue that the notion of ‘stability’ is too strong for formulating ‘maintenance’ goals of an agent – in particular, reactive and software agents, and give examples of such agents. We present a weaker notion of ‘maintainability’ and show that our agents which do not satisfy the stability criteria, do satisfy the weaker criteria. We give algorithms to test maintainability, and also to generate control for maintainability. We then develop the notion of ‘supportability’ that generalizes both ‘maintainability’ and ‘stabilizability, develop an automata theory that distinguishes between exogenous and control actions, and develop a temporal logic based on it. [114] Fredrik Heintz, Johan Kummeneje and Paul Scerri. 2000. Simulated RoboCup in University Undergraduate Education. In Proceedings of the Fourth Internation Workshop on RoboCup. [113] Patrik Haslum and Peter Jonsson. 2000. Planning with Reduced Operator Sets. In Steve Chien, Subbarao Kambhampati, Craig A. Knoblock, editors, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS), pages 150–158. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-111-5. Classical propositional STRIPS planning is nothing but the search for a path in the state transition graph induced by the operators in the planning problem. What makes the problem hard is the size and the sometimes adverse structure of this graph. We conjecture that the search for a plan would be more efficient if there were only a small number of paths from the initial state to the goal state. To verify this conjecture, we define the notion of reduced operator sets and describe ways of finding such reduced sets. We demonstrate that some state-of-the-art planners run faster using reduced operator sets. [112] Patrik Haslum and Héctor Geffner. 2000. Admissible Heuristics for Optimal Planning. In Steve Chien, Subbarao Kambhampati, Craig A. Knoblock, editors, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS), pages 140–149. AAAI Press. ISBN: 978-1-57735-111-5. Note: There is an error in the paper: the condition for commutativity of actions (section "Commutativity Pruning") must also include that neither action adds a precondition of the other. Thus, commutativity is not the same as Graphplan-style "non-interference". hsp and hspr are two recent planners that search the state-space using an heuristic function extracted from Strips encodings. hsp does a forward search from the initial state recomputing the heuristic in every state, while hspr does a regression search from the goal computing a suitable representation of the heuristic only once. Both planners have shown good performance, often producing solutions that are competitive in time and number of actions with the solutions found by Graphplan and sat planners. hsp and hsp r, however, are not optimal planners. This is because the heuristic function is not admissible and the search algorithms are not optimal. In this paper we address this problem. We formulate a new admissible heuristic for planning, use it to guide an ida search, and empirically evaluate the resulting optimal planner over a number of domains. The main contribution is the idea underlying the heuristic that yields not one but a whole family of polynomial and admissible heuristics that trade accuracy for efficiency. The formulation is general and sheds some light on the heuristics used in hsp and Graphplan, and their relation. It exploits the factored (Strips) representation of planning problems, mapping shortest-path problems in state-space into suitably defined shortest-path problems in atom-space. The formulation applies with little variation to sequential and parallel planning, and problems with different action costs. [111] Erik Johan Sandewall. 2000. M. Shanahan, Solving the Frame Problem. Artificial Intelligence, 123(1-2):271–273. DOI: 10.1016/S0004-3702(00)00058-8. [110] Fredrik Heintz. 2000. FCFoo99. In Proceedings of RoboCup-99: Robot Soccer World Cup III (RoboCup), pages 563–566. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1856. Springer London. ISBN: 3-540-41043-0. [109] Peter Jonsson, Patrik Haslum and Christer Bäckström. 2000. Towards efficient universal planning: A randomized approach. Artificial Intelligence, 117(1):1–29. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/S0004-3702(99)00103-4. One of the most widespread approaches to reactive planning is Schoppers' universal plans. We propose a stricter definition of universal plans which guarantees a weak notion of soundness, not present in the original definition, and isolate three different types of completeness that capture different behaviors exhibited by universal plans. We show that universal plans which run in polynomial time and are of polynomial size cannot satisfy even the weakest type of completeness unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. By relaxing either the polynomial time or the polynomial space requirement, the construction of universal plans satisfying the strongest type of completeness becomes trivial. As an alternative approach, we study randomized universal planning. By considering a randomized version of completeness and a restricted (but nontrivial) class of problems, we show that there exists randomized universal plans running in polynomial time and using polynomial space which are sound and complete for the restricted class of problems. We also report experimental results on this approach to planning, showing that the performance of a randomized planner is not easily compared to that of a deterministic planner. [108] Patrick Doherty and Jonas Kvarnström. 2000. TALplanner: A temporal logic based forward chaining planner. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 30(1-4):119–169. Springer. DOI: 10.1023/A:1016619613658. We present TALplanner, a forward-chaining planner based on the use of domain-dependent search control knowledge represented as formulas in the Temporal Action Logic (TAL). TAL is a narrative based linear metric time logic used for reasoning about action and change in incompletely specified dynamic environments. TAL is used as the formal semantic basis for TALplanner, where a TAL goal narrative with control formulas is input to TALplanner which then generates a TAL narrative that entails the goal and control formulas. The sequential version of TALplanner is presented. The expressivity of plan operators is then extended to deal with an interesting class of resource types. An algorithm for generating concurrent plans, where operators have varying durations and internal state, is also presented. All versions of TALplanner have been implemented. The potential of these techniques is demonstrated by applying TALplanner to a number of standard planning benchmarks in the literature. [107] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and E. Madalin´ska-Bugaj. 2000. The PMA and relativizing minimal change for action update. Fundamenta Informaticae, 44(1-2):95–131. IOS Press. Recently, a great deal of progress has been made using nonmonotonic temporal logics to formalize reasoning about action and change. In particular, much focus has been placed on the proper representation of non-deterministic actions and the indirect effects of actions. For the latter the use of causal or fluent dependency rule approaches has been dominant. Although much recent effort has also been spent applying the belief revision/update (BR/U) approach to the action and change domain, there has been less progress in dealing with nondeterministic update and indirect effects represented as integrity constraints. We demonstrate that much is to be gained by cross-fertilization between the two paradigms and we show this in the following manner. We first propose a generalization of the PMA, called the modified MPMA which uses intuitions from the TL paradigm to permit representation of nondeterministic update and the use of integrity constraints interpreted as causal or fluent dependency rules. We provide several syntactic characterizations of MPMA, one of which is in terms of a simple temporal logic and provide a representation theorem showing equivalence between the two. In constructing the MPMA, we discovered a syntactic anomaly which we call the redundant atom anomaly that many TL approaches suffer from. We provide a method for avoiding the problem which is equally applicable across paradigms. We also describe a syntactic characterization of MPMA in terms of Dijkstra semantics. We set up a framework for future generalization of the BR/U approach and conclude with a formal comparison of related approaches. [106] Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty. 2000. Tackling the qualification problem using fluent dependency constraints. Computational intelligence, 16(2):169–209. Blackwell Publishing. DOI: 10.1111/0824-7935.00111. In the area of formal reasoning about action and change, one of the fundamental representation problems is providing concise modular and incremental specifications of action types and world models, where instantiations of action types are invoked by agents such as mobile robots. Provided the preconditions to the action are true, their invocation results in changes to the world model concomitant with the goal-directed behavior of the agent. One particularly difficult class of related problems, collectively called the qualification problem, deals with the need to find a concise incremental and modular means of characterizing the plethora of exceptional conditions that might qualify an action, but generally do not, without having to explicitly enumerate them in the preconditions to an action. We show how fluent dependency constraints together with the use of durational fluents can be used to deal with problems associated with action qualification using a temporal logic for action and change called TAL-Q. We demonstrate the approach using action scenarios that combine solutions to the frame, ramification, and qualification problems in the context of actions with duration, concurrent actions, nondeterministic actions, and the use of both Boolean and non-Boolean fluents. The circumscription policy used for the combined problems is reducible to the first-order case. [105] Jonas Kvarnström, Patrick Doherty and Patrik Haslum. 2000. Extending TALplanner with concurrency and resources. In Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI). In series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications #54. IOS Press. ISBN: 1586030132. We present TALplanner, a forward-chaining planner based on the use of domain-dependent search control knowledge represented as temporal formulas in the Temporal Action Logic (TAL). TAL is a narrative based linear metric time logic used for reasoning about action and change in incompletely specified dynamic environments. TAL is used as the formal semantic basis for TALplanner, where a TAL goal narrative with control formulas is input to TALplanner which then generates a TAL narrative that entails the goal formula. We extend the sequential version of TALplanner, which has previously shown impressive performance on standard benchmarks, in two respects: 1) TALplanner is extended to generate concurrent plans, where operators have varied durations and internal state; and 2) the expressiveness of plan operators is extended for dealing with several different types of resources. The extensions to the planner have been implemented and concurrent planning with resources is demonstrated using an extended logistics benchmark. [104] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 2000. Efficient reasoning using the local closed-world assumption. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems and Applications (AIMSA), pages 49–58. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1904. Springer. ISBN: 3-540-41044-9. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-45331-8_5. We present a sound and complete, tractable inference method for reasoning with localized closed world assumptions (LCWA’s) which can be used in applications where a reasoning or planning agent can not assume complete information about planning or reasoning states. This Open World Assumption is generally necessary in most realistic robotics applications. The inference procedure subsumes that described in Etzioni et al [9], and others. In addition, it provides a great deal more expressivity, permitting limited use of negation and disjunction in the representation of LCWA’s, while still retaining tractability. The ap- proach is based on the use of circumscription and quantifier elimination techniques and inference is viewed as querying a deductive database. Both the preprocessing of the database using circumscription and quan- tifier elimination, and the inference method itself, have polynomial time and space complexity. [103] Patrick Doherty, Gösta Granlund, Krzysztof Kuchcinski, Erik Johan Sandewall, Klas Nordberg, Erik Skarman and Johan Wiklund. 2000. The WITAS unmanned aerial vehicle project. In Werner Horn, editor, Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), pages 747–755. IOS Press. ISBN: 1-58603-013-2, 4-274-90388-5. The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad overview of the WITAS Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Project. The WITAS UAV project is an ambitious, long-term basic research project with the goal of developing technologies and functionalities necessary for the successful deployment of a fully autonomous UAV operating over diverse geographical terrain containing road and traffic networks. Theproject is multi-disciplinary in nature, requiring many different research competences, and covering a broad spectrum of basic research issues, many of which relate to current topics in artificial intelligence. A number of topics considered are knowledge representation issues, active vision systems and their integration with deliberative/reactive architectures, helicopter modeling and control, ground operator dialogue systems, actual physical platforms, and a number of simulation techniques. [102] Gösta Granlund, Klas Nordberg, Johan Wiklund, Patrick Doherty, Erik Skarman and Erik Sandewall. 2000. WITAS: An Intelligent Autonomous Aircraft Using Active Vision. In Proceedings of the UAV 2000 International Technical Conference and Exhibition (UAV). Euro UVS. The WITAS Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Project is a long term basic research project located at Linköping University (LIU), Sweden. The project is multi-disciplinary in nature and involves cooperation with different departments at LIU, and a number of other universities in Europe, the USA, and South America. In addition to academic cooperation, the project involves collaboration with a number of private companies supplying products and expertise related to simulation tools and models, and the hardware and sensory platforms used for actual flight experimentation with the UAV. Currently, the project is in its second phase with an intended duration from 2000-2003.This paper will begin with a brief overview of the project, but will focus primarily on the computer vision related issues associated with interpreting the operational environment which consists of traffic and road networks and vehicular patterns associated with these networks. 1999 [101] Andreas Nonnengart, Hans-Jürgen Ohlbach and Andrzej Szalas. 1999. Elimination of Predicate Quantifiers. In Logic, Language and Reasoning. Essays in Honor of Dov Gabbay, Part I, pages 159–181. Kluwer Academic Publishers. [100] Lars Karlsson and Joakim Gustafsson. 1999. Reasoning about Concurrent Interaction. Journal of logic and computation (Print), 9(5):623–650. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/logcom/9.5.623. In this paper we present TAL-C, a logic of action and change for worlds with action concurrency. TAL-C has a first-order semantics and proof theory. It builds on an existing logic TAL, which includes the use of dependency laws for dealing with ramification. It is demonstrated how TAL-C can represent a number of phenomena related to action concurrency: action duration, how the effects of one action interferes with or enables another action, synergistic effects of concurrent actions, conflicting and cumulative effect interactions, and resource conflicts. A central idea is that actions are not described as having effects that directly alter the world state. Instead, actions produce influences, and the way these influences alter the world state are described in specialized influence laws. Finally, we address how TAL-C narratives can be written to support modularity. [99] Patrik Haslum. 1999. Model Checking by Random Walk. In Proceedings of the ECSEL Workshop (CCSSE). While model checking algorithms are in theory efficient, they are in practice hampered by the explosive growth of system models. We show that for certain specifications the model cheking problem reduces to a question of reachability in the system state transition graph, and apply a simple, randomized algorithm to this problem. [98] Thord Andersson, Silvia Coradeschi and Alessandro Saffiotti. 1999. Fuzzy matching of visual cues in an unmanned airborne vehicle. Technical Report. Linköping University, Department of Electrical Engineering. Computer vision systems used in autonomous mobile vehicles are typically linked to higher-level deliberation processes. One important aspect of this link is how to connect, or anchor, the symbols used at the higher level to the objects in the vision system that these symbols refer to. Anchoring is complicated by the fact that the vision data are inherently affected by uncertainty. We propose an anchoring technique that uses fuzzy sets to represent the uncertainty in the perceptual data. We show examples where this technique allows a deliberative system to reason about the objects (cars) detected by a vision system embarked in an unmanned helicopter, in the framework of the Witas project. [97] Thomas Drakengren and Marcus Bjäreland. 1999. Reasoning about action in polynomial time. Artificial Intelligence, 115(1):1–24. Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/S0004-3702(99)00065-X. Although many formalisms for reasoning about action exist, surprisingly few approaches have taken computational complexity into consideration. The contributions of this article are the following: a temporal logic with a restriction for which deciding satisfiability is tractable, a tractable extension for reasoning about action, and NP-completeness results for the unrestricted problems. Many interesting reasoning problems can be modelled, involving nondeterminism, concurrency and memory of actions. The reasoning process is proved to be sound and complete. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. [96] Paul Scerri, Silvia Coradeschi and Anders Törne. 1999. A user oriented system for developing behavior based agents. In Minoru Asada and Hiroaki Kitano, editors, RoboCup-98: Robot Soccer World Cup II, pages 173–186. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1604. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. ISBN: 978-3-540-66320-1, e-978-3-540-48422-6, 3-540-66320-7. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-48422-1_14. Developing agents for simulation environments is usually the responsibility of computer experts. However, as domain experts have superior knowledge of the intended agent behavior, it is desirable to have domain experts directly specifying behavior. In this paper we describe a system which allows non-computer experts to specify the behavior of agents for the RoboCup domain. An agent designer is presented with a Graphical User Interface with which he can specify behaviors and activation conditions for behaviors in a layered behavior-based system. To support the testing and debugging process we are also developing interfaces that show, in real-time, the world from the agents perspective and the state of its reasoning process. [95] Silvia Coradeschi and Jasec Malec. 1999. How to make a challenging AI course enjoyable using the RoboCup soccer simulation system. In Minoru Asada and Hiroaki Kitano, editors, RoboCup-98: Robot Soccer World Cup II, pages 120–124. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1604. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. ISBN: 3-540-66320-7. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-48422-1_9. In this paper we present an AI programming organised around the RoboCup soccer simulation system. The course participants create a number of software agents that form a team, and participate in a tournament at the end of the course. The use of a challenging and interesting task, and the incentive of having a tournament has made the course quite successful, both in term of enthusiasm of the students and of knowledge acquired. In the paper we describe the structure of the course, discuss in what respect we think the course has met its aim, and the opinions of the students about the course. [94] Marcus Bjäreland and Peter Jonsson. 1999. Exploiting bipartiteness to identify yet another tractable subclass of CSP. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP), pages 118–128. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1713. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-48085-3_9. The class of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) over finite domains has been shown to be NP-complete, but many tractable subclasses have been identified in the literature. In this paper we are interested in restrictions on the types of constraint relations in CSP instances. By a result of Jeavons et al. we know that a key to the complexity of classes arising from such restrictions is the closure properties of the sets of relations. It has been shown that sets of relations that are closed under constant, majority, affine, or associative, commutative, and idempotent (ACI) functions yield tractable subclasses of CSP. However, it has been unknown whether other closure properties may generate tractable subclasses. In this paper we introduce a class of tractable (in fact, SL-complete) CSPs based on bipartite graphs. We show that there are members of this class that are not closed under constant, majority, affine, or ACI functions, and that it, therefore, is incomparable with previously identified classes. [93] Patrik Haslum and Peter Jonsson. 1999. Some results on the complexity of planning with incomplete information. In Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Planning (ECP), pages 308–318. In series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1809. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/10720246_24. Planning with incomplete information may mean a number of different things, that certain facts of the initial state are not known, that operators can have random or nondeterministic effects, or that the plans created contain sensing operations and are branching. Study of the complexity of incomplete information planning has so far been concentrated on probabilistic domains, where a number of results have been found. We examine the complexity of planning in nondeterministic propositional domains. This differs from domains involving randomness, which has been well studied, in that for a nondeterministic choice, not even a probability distribution over the possible outcomes is known. The main result of this paper is that the non-branching plan existence problem in unobservable domains with an expressive operator formalism is EXPSPACE-complete. We also discuss several restrictions, which bring the complexity of the problem down to PSPACF-complete, and extensions to the fully and partially observable cases. [92] Patrick Doherty, Jaroslaw Kachniarz and Andrzej Szalas. 1999. Meta-queries on deductive databases. Fundamenta Informaticae, 40(1):17–30. IOS Press. DOI: 10.3233/FI-1999-40102. We introduce the notion of a meta-query on relational databases and a technique which can be used to represent and solve a number of interesting problems from the area of knowledge representation using logic. The technique is based on the use of quantifier elimination and may also be used to query relational databases using a declarative query language called SHQL (Semi-Horn Query Language), introduced in [6]. SHQL is a fragment of classical first-order predicate logic and allows us to define a query without supplying its explicit definition. All SHQL queries to the database can be processed in polynomial time (both on the size of the input query and the size of the database). We demonstrate the use of the technique in problem solving by structuring logical puzzles from the Knights and Knaves domain as SHQL meta-queries on relational databases. We also provide additional examples demonstrating the flexibility of the technique. We conclude with a description of a newly developed software tool, The Logic Engineer, which aids in the description of algorithms using transformation and reduction techniques such as those applied in the meta-querying approach. [91] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 1999. Declarative PTIME queries for relational databases using quantifier elimination. Journal of logic and computation (Print), 9(5):737–758. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/logcom/9.5.737. In this paper, we consider the problem of expressing and computing queries on relational deductive databases in a purely declarative query language, called SHQL (Semi-Horn Query Language). Assuming the relational databases in question are ordered, we show that all SHQL queries are computable in PTIME (polynomial time) and the whole class of PTIME queries is expressible in SHQL. Although similar results have been proven for fixpoint languages and extensions to datalog, the claim is that SHQL has the advantage of being purely declarative, where the negation operator is interpreted as classical negation, mixed quantifiers may be used and a query is simply a restricted first-order theory not limited by the rule-based syntactic restrictions associated with logic programs in general. We describe the PTIME algorithm used to compute queries in SHQL which is based in part on quantifier elimination techniques and also consider extending the method to incomplete relational databases using intuitions related to circumscription techniques. [90] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and E. Madalin´ska-Bugaj. 1999. Computing MPMA updates using dijkstra's semantics. In 12th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems,1999. Springer. [89] Patrick Doherty and Jonas Kvarnström. 1999. TALplanner: An empirical investigation of a temporal logic-based forward chaining planner. In Clare Dixon, Michael Fisher, editors, 6th International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME-99). IEEE Computer Society. ISBN: 0-7695-0173-7. We present a new forward chaining planner, TALplanner, based on ideas developed by Bacchus and Kabanza, where domain-dependent search control knowledge represented as temporal formulas is used to effectively control forward chaining. Instead of using a linear modal tense logic as with Bacchus and Kabanza, we use TAL, a narrative-based linear temporal logic used for reasoning about action and change in incompletely specified dynamic environments. Two versions of TALplanner are considered, TALplan/modal which is based on the use of emulated modal formulas and a progression algorithm, and TALplan/non-modal which uses neither modal formulas nor a progression algorithm. For both versions of TALplanner and for all tested domains, TALplanner is shown to be considerably faster and requires less memory. The TAL versions also permit the representation of durative actions with internal state. [88] John-Jules Meyer and Patrick Doherty. 1999. Preferential action semantics (preliminary report). In Formal Models of Agents: ESPRIT Project Modelage Final Workshop Selected Papers, pages 187–201. In series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #1760. Springer. ISBN: 3-540-67027-0. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-46581-2_13. Note: Preliminary report In this paper, we propose a new way of considering reasoning about action and change. Rather than placing a preferential structure onto the models of logical theories, we place such a structure directly on the semantics of the actions involved. In this way, we obtain a preferential semantics of actions by means of which we can not only deal with several of the traditional problems in this area such as the frame and ramification problems, but can generalize these solutions to a context which includes both nondeterministic and concurrent actions. In fact, the net result is an integration of semantical and verificational techniques from the paradigm of imperative and concurrent programs in particular, as known from traditional programming, with the AI perspective. In this paper, the main focus is on semantical (i.e. model theoretical) issues rather than providing a logical calculus, which would be the next step in the endeavor. [87] Lars Karlsson. 1999. Actions, interactions and narratives. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #593. Linköpings universitet. 222 pages. ISBN: 91-7219-534-7. The area of reasoning about action and change is concerned with the formalization of actions and their effects as well as other aspects of inhabited dynamical systems. The representation is typically done in some logical language. Although there has been substantial progress recently regarding the frame problem and the ramification problem, many problems still remain. One of these problems is the representation of concurrent actions and their effects. In particular, the effects of two or more actions executed concurrently may be different from the union of the effects of the individual actions had they been executed in isolation. This thesis presents a language, TAL-C, which supports detailed and flexible yet modular descriptions of concurrent interactions. Two related topics, which both require a solution to the concurrency problem, are also addressed: the representation of effects of actions that occur with some delay, and the representation of actions that are caused by other actions.Another aspect of reasoning about action and change is how to describe higher-level reasoning tasks such as planning and explanation. In such cases, it is important not to just be able to reason about a specific narrative (course of action), but to reason about alternative narratives and their properties, to compare and manipulate narratives, and to reason about alternative results of a specific narrative. This subject is addressed in the context of the situation calculus, where it is shown how the standard version provides insufficient support for reasoning about alternative results, and an alternative version is proposed. The narrative logic NL is also presented; it is based on the temporal action logic TAL, where narratives are represented as first-order terms. NL supports reasoning about (I) metric time, (II) alternative ways the world can develop relative to a specific choice of actions, and (III) alternative choices of actions. [86] Silvia Coradeschi. 1999. Anchoring symbols to sensory data. PhD Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations #611. Linköpings universitet. 136 pages. ISBN: 91-7219-623-8. Intelligent agents embedded in physical environments need the ability to connect, or anchor, the symbols used to perform abstract reasoning to the physical entities which these symbols refer to. Anchoring must deal with indexical and objective references, definite and indefinite identifiers, and a temporary impossibility to perceive physical entities. Furthermore it needs to rely on sensor data which is inherently affected by uncertainty, and to deal with ambiguities. In this thesis, we outline the concept of anchoring and its functionalities. Moreover we define the general structure for an anchoring module and we present an implementation of the anchoring functionalities in two different domains: an autonomous airborne vehicle for traffic surveillance and a mobile ground vehicle performing navigation. [85] Silvia Coradeschi, Lars Karlsson and Klas Nordberg. 1999. Integration of vision and decision-making in an autonomous airborne vehicle for traffic surveillance. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Vision Systems '99: Grand Canary. In this paper we present a system which integrates computer vision and decision-making in an autonomous airborne vehicle that performs traffic surveillance tasks. The main factors that make the integration of vision and decision-making a challenging problem are: the qualitatively different kind of information at the decision-making and vision levels, the need for integration of dynamically acquired information with a priori knowledge, e.g. GIS information, and the need of close feedback and guidance of the vision module by the decision-making module. Given the complex interaction between the vision module and the decision-making module we propose the adoption of an intermediate structure, called Scene Information Manager, and describe its structure and functionalities. 1998 [84] Leonard Bolc, Krzysztof Dziewicki, Piotr Rychlik and Andrzej Szalas. 1998. Wnioskowanie w logikach nieklasycznych: Automatyzacja wnioskowania. Book. Academic Pub. PLJ (Akademicka Oficyna Wydawnicza PLJ). 159 pages. ISBN: 83-7101-403-1, 978-83-7101-403-1. Find book in another country/Hitta boken i ett annat land: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=83-7101... [83] Andreas Nonnengart and Andrzej Szalas. 1998. A Fixpoint Approach to Second-Order Quantifier Elimination with Applications to Correspondence Theory. In Ewa Orlowska, editor, Logic at work: essays dedicated to the memory of Helena Rasiowa, pages 307–328. In series: Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing #24. Physica Verlag. ISBN: 3-7908-1164-5. Find book at a Swedish library/Hitta boken i ett svenskt bibliotek: http://libris.kb.se/hitlist?d=libris&q=3... Find book in another country/Hitta boken i ett annat land: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=3-7908-... [82] Marcus Bjäreland. 1998. Two Aspects of Automating Logics of Action and Change: Regression and Tractability. Licentiate Thesis. In series: Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Thesis #674. Linköpings universitet. 83 pages. ISBN: 91-7219-173-2. Note: Thesis No 674. LiU-Tek-Lic 1998:09 The autonomy of an artificial agent (e.g. a robot) will certainly depend on its ability to perform \"intelligent\" tasks, such as learning, planning, and reasoning about its own actions and their effects on the enviroment, for example predicting the consequences of its own behaviour. To be able to perform these (and many more) tasks, the agent will have to represent its knowledge about the world.The research field \"Logics of Action Change\" is concerned with the modelling of agents and dynamical, changing environments with logics.In this thesis we study two aspects of automation of logics of action and change. The first aspect, regression, is used to \"reason backwards\", i.e. to start with the last time point in a description of a course of events, and moving backwards through these events, taking the effects of all actions into consideration. We discuss the consequences for regression of introducing nondeterministic actions, and provide the logic PMON with pre- and postdiction procedures. We employ the classical computer science tool, the weakest liberal precondition operator (wlp) for this, and show that logical entailment of PMON is equivalent to wlp computations.The second aspect is computational complexity of logics of action and change, which has virtually been neglected by the research community. We present a new and expressive logic, capable of expressing continuous time, nondeterministic actions, concurrency, and memory of actions. We show that satisfiability of a theory in this logic is NP-complete. Furthermore, we identify a tractable subset of the logic, and provide a sound, complete, and polynomial algorithm for satisfiability of the subset. [81] Patrick Doherty and Joakim Gustafsson. 1998. Delayed effects of actions = direct effects + causal rules. Technical Report. In series: Linköping Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science #98-001. Linköping University Electronic Press. Link: http://www.ep.liu.se/ea/cis/1998/001/ We propose an approach to modeling delayed effects of actions which is based on the use of causal constraints and their interaction with the direct effects of actions. The approach extends previous work with a causal approach used to deal with the ramification problem. We show the similarity between solutions to the modeling of indirect effects and delayed effects of actions by example. The base logic PMON+ is a temporal logic for reasoning about action and change and uses circumscription. It is shown that the extension for delayed effects of actions retains the first-order reducibility property shown previously for successfully dealing with the frame and ramification problems for a large class of action scenarios. We also consider the “causal qualification” problem, \"natural death\" of fluents and causal lag, each of which is closely related to the use of delayed effects. [80] Patrick Doherty, Joakim Gustafsson, Lars Karlsson and Jonas Kvarnström. 1998. (TAL) temporal action logics: Language specification and tutorial. Electronic Transactions on Artifical Intelligence, 2(3-4):273–306. Link: http://www.ep.liu.se/ej/etai/1998/009/ The purpose of this article is to provide a uniform, lightweight language specication and tutorial for a class of temporal logics for reasoning about action and change that has been developed by our group during the period 1994-1998. The class of logics are collected under the name TAL, an acronym for Temporal Action Logics. TAL has its origins and inspiration in the work with Features and Fluents (FF) by Sandewall, but has diverged from the methodology and approach through the years. We first discuss distinctions and compatibility with FF, move on to the lightweight language specication, and then present a tutorial in terms of an excursion through the different parts of a relatively complex narrative defined using TAL. We conclude with an annotated list of published work from our group. The article tries to strike a reasonable balance between detail and readability, making a number of simplications regarding narrative syntax and translation to a base logical language. Full details are available in numerous technical reports and articles which are listed in the final section of this article. [79] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Andrzej Szalas. 1998. General domain circumscription and its effective reductions. Fundamenta Informaticae, 36(1):23–55. IOS Press. DOI: 10.3233/FI-1998-3612. We first define general domain circumscription (GDC) and provide it with a semantics. GDC subsumes existing domain circumscription proposals in that it allows varying of arbitrary predicates, functions, or constants, to maximize the minimization of the domain of a theory. We then show that for the class of semi-universal theories without function symbols, that the domain circumscription of such theories can be constructively reduced to logically equivalent first-order theories by using an extension of the DLS algorithm, previously proposed by the authors for reducing second-order formulas. We also show that for a certain class of domain circumscribed theories, that any arbitrary second-order circumscription policy applied to these theories is guaranteed to be reducible to a logically equivalent first-order theory. In the case of semi-universal theories with functions and arbitrary theories which are not separated, we provide additional results, which although not guaranteed to provide reductions in all cases, do provide reductions in some cases. These results are based on the use of fixpoint reductions. [78] Lars Karlsson, Joakim Gustafsson and Patrick Doherty. 1998. Delayed effects of actions. In Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), pages 542–546. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 978-0471984313. [77] Patrick Doherty, Witold Lukaszewicz and Ewa Madalinska-Bugaj. 1998. The PMA and relativizing change for action update. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), pages 258–269. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Using intuitions from the temporal reasoning community, we provide a generalization of the PMA, called the modified PMA (MPMA), which permits the representation of disjunctive updates and the use of integrity constraints interpreted as causal constraints. In addition, we provide a number of syntactic characterizations of the MPMA, one of which is constructed by mapping an MPMA update of a knowledge base into a temporal narrative in a simple temporal logic (STL). The resulting representation theorem provides a basis for computing entailments of the MPMA and could serve as a basis for further generalization of the belief update approach for reasoning about action and change. [76] Patrick Doherty and Jonas Kvarnström. 1998. Tackling the qualification problem using fluent dependency constraints. In Lina Khatib, Robert Morris, editors, Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME-98). IEEE Computer Society. ISBN: 0-8186-8473-9. Note: Preliminary report The use of causal rules or fluent dependency constraints has proven to provide a versatile means of dealing with the ramification problem. In this paper we show how fluent dependency constraints together with the use of durational fluents can be used to deal with problems associated with action qualification. We provide both a \emph{weak} and \emph{strong} form of qualification and demonstrate the approach using an action scenario which combines solutions to the frame, ramification and qualification problems in the context of actions with duration, concurrent actions, non-deterministic actions and the use of both boolean and non-boolean fluents. The circumscription policy used for the combined problems is reducible to the 1st-order case. In addition, we demonstrate the use of a research tool VITAL, for querying and visualizing action scenarios. 1997 [75] Thomas Drakengren and Marcus Bjäreland. 1997. Reasoning about Action in Polynomial Time. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). [74] Marcus Bjäreland and Lars Karlsson. 1997. Reasoning by Regression: Pre- and Postdiction Procedures for Logics of Action and Change with Nondeterminism. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Artficial Intelligence (IJCAI). [73] Erik Sandewall. 1997. Strategies and policies of Linköping University Electronic Press. Technical Report. In series: Linköping Electronic Articles on Academic Policies and Trends #1 Vol. 1. Linköping University Electronic Press. 15 pages. Linköping University has recently created a separate entity, called Linköping University Electronic Press, for the unrefereed electronic publication of research articles and other university-related materials over the Internet. The present article presents the background for why the E-Press was created and the strategies which have been chosen for its operation at least during its initial period. The article identifies three key problems in the context of this strategy: ﻿
• The purely formal problems concerning what counts as a publication;
• The persistence problem of making sure that an electronically published article does not change over time;
• The reception problems concerning how fellow researchersand the academic community regard electronically published articles.
We describe how the formal problems and the persistence problems have been addressed in the E-Press initiative. With respect to the reception problems, we argue that scientific journals and journal-like conferences presently perform four distinct functions, and that these functions can be performed better if they are “unbundled” and addressed by other means. The four functions are:
• Publication in the narrow sense - making the article publicly available;
• Scientific quality control through reviewing;
• Selection of relevant articles for the benefit of the researcher-reader;
• Promotion of the scientific results of the author.
The Electronic Press focusses on the first one of these four functions. We discuss how the other three functions can be separated and performed by other means than through a conventional journal or quality conference proceedings.
[72] Erik Sandewall. 1997. A Neo-Classical Structure for Scientific Publication and Reviewing. Technical Report. In series: Linköping Electronic Articles on Academic Policies and Trends #1 Vol, 2. Linköping University Electronic Press. 28 pages. I propose a neo-classical structure for publishing and reviewing of scientific works. This proposal has the following characteristic components:
• Electronic “preprint archives” and other similar mechanisms where research articles are made publicly available without prior formal review are considered as true and full-fledged publication of research from the point of view of priority of results.
• Large parts of the reviewing process is done publicly and in the form of published review letters and other contributions to the scientific debate, rather than through anonymous and confidential review statements which dominate today. There is a switch from anonymous “pass-fail” reviewing towards open reviewing where the identity and the comments of the reviewers are made public.
• Since open reviewing happens after publication, rather than before, there is a second step where articles are promoted to “recommended” or “certified” status through the decision of a review committee. The requirements for certification are set at least as high as for the formally published journal articles of today, so that it counts like journal publication in a CV.
• Several techniques are foreseen for facilitating the selection process of the individual reader as well as for improving communication as such between researchers.
• One should accept that there are good reasons why there may be several articles (from the same author) presenting the same result. This suggests the introduction of a formal concept of a “result” which is represented by several publications, and to allow citations to refer to results rather than to some specific publication of the result.
I refer to this system as neo-classical because it assumes that peer review is done openly and after an article has been published. It is of course only proposed as a complement which can easily co-exist with the modern system, allowing each author to choose which of the two systems he or she wishes to use for a particular article.