Fritz Heckel

Scientific:

Accomplishments:

• Mark Overmars’ question about updates which increase the strength of influence points made a good point; the quick answer is that if you can put an upper limit on the expected strength of the point at insertion, we can maintain constant time updates, though sometimes regions will then have points with no strength in the local area.

Challenges:

• There’s a question as to whether PRMs are a good choice for local navigation, so need to investigate some
• For next influence points paper, or possible journal version, need to come up with 2 or 3 different concrete scenarios for using them, as some people were confused  as to whether they would work in particular instances
• Hierarchical influence points and splitting/joining of influence points needs to be dealt with.

Engineering:

Accomplishments:

• AgentCore has some basics in, in that it will load up a list of agents from files and run them for a bit. There is no percept update, though effectors are generated.
• AgentController is complete
• Subsumption for ActionModel is to spec, mostly, though there may be minor issues with scoping
• Loading agents from xml works
• gotobehavior, alwaystrigger are complete
• query file generation is mostly complete, though it doesn’t deal with ranges and enumerated options just yet
• ThreadManager/WorkerManager works
• A lot of behaviors/triggers added to Mantis
• Created a model for BehaviorShop, and code to load an existing agent from XML
• Wrote the code for BehaviorShop to load query files from XML

Problems:

• Lots of behaviors and triggers to build
• Need communication still, but giving a little more time before I implement my solution