Fritz Heckel

Scientific:

Accomplishments:

• Outline of the agent engine evaluation is here

Challenges:

• What is the most effective way to deal with percepts? Clearly some– like egolocation– are constantly available percepts, and should just overwrite with new information. But transient percepts are trickier. We need to make sure they stick around long enough to get used, but individual events shouldn’t last forever. See the previous couple posts for more on this. There’s also the problem of tying the perceptual events to the objects that generate them. I have some idea of how ACT-R does this, at least.
• Behavior parameters and influence points had the back burner this week, but with a plan to deal with percepts– at least temporarily– I can dig into this a little more now.

Engineering:

Accomplishments:

• Finished hooking up the toolchain: the UI generates XML files courtesy of Hunter, and the agent engine now reads them in properly and builds up an agent.
• EventSimulation module built. This allows us to schedule events at various times. The events at present are just “hearnoise” percepts coupled with a location, but we can drop arbitrary transient percepts in it.
• New trigger: Hear Noise. This trigger activates on a hearnoise percept, and saves the location as data. It remains active until the behavior it triggers turns it off. Go to point has been modified to make use of this trigger.
• Added some new options to the agentcore config file: max-threads and target-utilization. Neither is used yet, but max-threads will be soon. Max-threads will define the maximum number of agentthreads spawned by agentcontrollers
• Resolved a bug in the FlexiVehicle opensteer class which was causing gotobehavior to flip out

Problems:

• SSPS still needs to be connected, but it hasn’t been completed yet
• Behavior parameters need to be implemented
• Influence points also need to be implemented

Scientific

1. I have had some ideas on how to present behavior parameters and some of the things we can do with them
2. Worked out idea for influence points with Dr. Y

Problems

1. Need to design an experiment for evaluating the agent core that can be combined with the general DASSIEs evaluation
2. Need to think further about the behavior parameters and how to present them, as well as exactly how they will combine best with influence points
3. Details on influence points and how best to evaluate; running time should work, but is there a performance metric?

Engineering

1. Have come to uneasy truce with gamecontroller thread weirdness. The problem appears to be with this thread, and not the agentcontroller or agentthread.
2. Figured out how to convert the steering forces to reasonable effector commands for now, though this may want to change once we have strafing.
3. Have two working behaviors: patrolbehavior and gotobehavior. Currently these use two separate opensteer classes.
4. Name possibility: Agent Alfa: Agent Architecture for Lightweight Flexible Agents. I really will have a name soon.

Problems

1. Still need to keep an eye out for the thread hangs/crashes, since there are some odd interactions between changes in the behaviors and performance of the gamecontroller thread
2. The steering still looks pretty ugly. We need strafing, and it wouldn’t hurt to be able to combine rotation and motion commands. Actually, it would be really nice.
3. Need to combine the opensteer classes. gotobehavior is based on the “FlexiVehicle” class; I intend to use this to also implement wander, but I made need to ultimately subclass this. Either way, each agent should have a single opensteer vehicle, so we’re not copying geometry into half a dozen different vehicles. Ideally, multiple agents will ultimately share geometry, but I’ll worry about that later.
4. Need to lay out some groundwork for the influence point service
5. Need to hook up SSPS to the agentcore

Paper Status

1. FLAIRS paper w/Hunter on interface evaluation: Need to talk with Hunter about this, but we should have sufficient behaviors to run this, at least.
2. FLAIRS paper on influence points: Not yet started, except for catching up on background work
3. FGDA paper: nothing yet.
4. HRI Pioneers Workshop abstract: Need to take care of this by Oct 15, but it’s short. Will probably combine summer work at NRL and current work at UNCC for this. Also need to pass on request to Dr. Y for letter(email) of support.