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

An admittedly unproductive week, and I don’t have a good excuse.

Scientific:

Accomplishments:

• FLAIRS paper accepted

Challenges:

• Not happy with how I’m storing information about other agents yet

Engineering:

Accomplishments:

• Agent parameters, for storing knowledge about other agents, are hacked into the perceptual model
• Behavior parameters hacked in
• Triggers on parameters are mostly in place

Problems:

• Still working on SSPS rewrite
• Working on new behaviors for guard scenario
• My original percept passing method is really too ugly to live, but I’m leaving it in place since we’re migrating to C++ anyway

• IROS paper possibility for March 1

Scientific:

Accomplishments:

• FDG 09 paper got out on the 23rd
• HRI 09 abstract has been accepted. I’m author 4 of 6 on this paper/poster, for setting up the experiment while at NRL and drafting the first paper

Challenges:

• Influence points need to be integrated into BEHAVEngine properly
• Behavior parameters should probably be formalized; they’re simple, but I want to be sure I’m using them in a principled manner

Engineering:

Accomplishments:

• C++ rewrite of BEHAVEngine and associated utilities begun; it should end up being fully cross-platform
• Persuaded all necessary libraries to work : boost, stlport, libxml
• agentcore and agent XML files fully parsed in C++
• problems in agent XML schema fixed

Problems:

• Need to figure out how to use boost graph library, which should make working with SSPS easier and more efficient
• SSPS rewrite shouldn’t take long, but will take a bit of time
• Hunter reports some sort of crash in Python BEHAVEngine, but I have no details at present
• Generally just need to do the BEHAVEngine rewrite, including Influence Points and all behaviors

• IAAI paper on DASSIEs (Dr. Y as lead)
• IROS paper possibility for March 1
• GDC scholarship deadline is soon

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.