This award will support a U.S.-French collaborative research program focused on two highly important problems in robotics: indoor mobile robots and dexterous manipulation. The researchers involved in this joint project are Thomas Henderson, University of Utah, Ed Riseman, University of Massachusetts and Oliver Faugeras, French National Institute for Information Science and Automation (INRIA) - Sophia Antipolis. The proposed collaborative effort will permit the investigation of a new approach for the specification of robot behavior and control. The development of complex systems for robot control and the discovery of the principles of their organization require a multifaceted research effort whose components are comprised of significant and robust modules based on proven theory. The three involved research teams each have made significant theoretical and engineering contributions in the area of behavior-based robot control. The University of Utah provides expertise in logical sensors and deterministic synchronous Finite State Automata; the University of Massachusetts provides expertise in programming languages and environments, robot control land low-level vision, and INRIA provides expertise in motion analysis, 3D representation and implementation testbeds. The group in France is one of the strongest European groups working on robot vision. This joint project will be focused on research on logical behaviors which characterize techniques for the satisfaction of imposed relations (i.e. tasks) in a semantic network representing the robot's world. The results of this collaborative effort should make a significant contribution to our understanding of mobile robot behavior.
