Cognitive Autonomous Systems Laboratory
Context, Background and History of WITAS RDE
The WITAS Project
has been a major basic research project concerning technologies
for providing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with high-level
autonomy. Most of the work in the project has been done at
Linköping University, but some subprojects have been done
at other sites. The first phase of the project (1997-01 -- 1999-12) only
concerned the UAV autonomy system and using simulation techniques.
For the second phase (2000-01 --) the project divided into two
branches:
- The WITAS UAV Technologies Project (2000-01 -- 2004-12) which
addressed
UAV onboard systems for high-level autonomy
- The WITAS Dialog Technology Project (2000-01 -- 2005-12) which has
addressed the design principles for dialog systems using
spoken natural language.
The relative size of the subprojects has been to the order of 80-20.
The dialog project has in turn consisted of two successive phases:
- The first phase (2000-01 -- 2002-12) was a subproject at
Stanford University led by Stanley Peters and Oliver Lemon,
developing the WITAS-Stanford Dialog System
- The second phase (since mid-2002, scheduled to end 2005-12)
has been done at
Linköping University, together with the UAV Technologies
Project, and led by Erik Sandewall. This subproject has
developed a suite of dialog-related systems that are jointly
called the WITAS Robotic Dialog Environment (RDE).
The first version of the WITAS RDE, called the DOSAR or DOSAR-1 system,
has been described in the overview article [2003-003]. After further
development and extensions, DOSAR is now seen as one of two main
parts of the current OPAS Operator Assistant system.
The present website describes the WITAS RDE, including both the
past and present systems for dialog and operator assistance, and
the adjoining facilities for Robotic Worlds and for infrastructure.
For information about other parts
of the entire WITAS project, please refer to the
main WITAS website
and (for the WITAS-Stanford Dialog System) to the website of the
Computational
Semantics Laboratory at Stanford University.
Posted on 2005-05-16 as part of the
CAISOR website.
[Version history].