This is the first year of a three year continuing award. The effort focuses on coordinated research in robotics, vision, real- time AI, and real-time software systems, in the context of a robotic assembly testbed. The emphasis is on flexible manufacturing automation involving active perception, planning, and cooperative activities among agents in real time. The project investigates integration of dextrous manipulation and vision, with cooperation among static and mobile robots and humans, and addresses current limitations of robotic systems in dealing with uncertainties and rapidly changing environments and tasks (such as occur in short-run production). Activities include development of multiple resolution representations which permit arbitration between local reflexive and global combinatoric strategies; studying tradeoffs between solution quality and computational speed in real-time systems; modeling cooperation and communication to achieve goal-oriented behavior; integrating architectures and algorithms for extracting relevant environmental information for control of distributed robotic manipulators; implementation of active perception to support model-based, goal oriented sensing for manufacturing assembly operations; constructing high level symbolic approaches to reasoning about geometry; and implementing learning mechanisms which model the environment based on experience over a general class of tasks to guide perception, planning, and multi-agent cooperation.
