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 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.