Fritz Heckel

Scientific:

Accomplishments:

• As part of the Intro to Research class, we had to write up a problem statement and a list of papers for a literature review. It’s a little short yet, but I’ve written it up here, and I’ll probably just keep that page around as a literature list. Also, the question isn’t quite right yet.

Challenges:

• While I have a temporary solution for this cycle of development, there is still a major question of how to deal with percepts properly. I really want to talk to a few people at the fall symposium about this, since I’d like to aim for a solution that is somewhere between an efficient architecture approach and a more realistic cognitive approach.
• The hearnoise trigger has a hack, as I believe I mentioned last week, which keeps it active until the behavior it triggers has completed its task. This is clearly not the right approach, so this is a place where we’ll really want a hierarchical behavior that uses some internal state to set goals. This is all tied up with the behavior parameters, I think, at least insofar as it’s all agent state.

Engineering:

Accomplishments:

• To help resolve the percept issues temporarily and permanently, I’ve introduced the PerceptManager. Each agent controller thread gets a perceptmanager that passes on the relevant percepts (so it will filter based on whether the percept is visible), and maintains a bin for pure percepts (straight overwrite) and a queue for transient percepts. It still needs a little work, but is basically set.

Problems:

• See last week.