Christopher A. Rouff

Experience from the DARPA Urban Challenge

Experience from the DARPA Urban Challenge provides details of the types of systems, software and processes that were used to develop the complex unmanned vehicles that participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge. The vehicle developers explain how autonomous vehicle software in this race was designed and implemented. The chapters range from system and software architecture, navigation, path planning, steering, perception, engineering autonomous systems, and testing and performance evaluation. This book is based on papers from entrants in the Urban Challenge. The content is broken into five parts: an introduction to the DARPA Urban Challenge;systems and software architectures;navigation;control and sensors; anddevelopment and test.Experience from the DARPA Urban Challenge provides graduate students in robotics and engineering professionals with an insight into multiple ways of approaching the development of autonomous vehicles.

Verification and validation of autonomous systems

NASA is working on complex future missions that require cooperation between multiple satellites or rovers. To implement these systems, developers are proposing and using intelligent and autonomous systems. These autonomous missions are new to NASA, and the software development community is just learning to develop such systems. With these new systems, new verification and validation techniques must be used. Current techniques have been developed based on large monolithic systems. These techniques have worked well and reliably, but do not translate to the new autonomous systems that are highly parallel and nondeterministic.

Innovative Concepts for Autonomic and Agent-Based Systems

Agent-Mediated Pro-active Web-Sites.- Learning to Use Referrals to Select Satisficing Service Providers.- Towards an Emotional Decision-Making.- A Self-adapting System Generating Intentional Behavior and Emotions.- A New Parameter for Maintaining Consistency in an Agents Knowledge Base Using Truth Maintenance Systems.- Mind Out of Programmable Matter: Exploring Unified Models of Emergent Autonomy.- Characterizing Environmental Information for Monitoring Agents.- Towards a Model Level Debugger for the Cougaar Model Driven Architecture System.- Can Agent Oriented Software Engineering Be Used to Build MASs Product Lines?.- Towards Dynamic Electronic Institutions: From Agent Coalitions to Agent Institutions.- Institutionalization Through Reciprocal Habitualization and Typification.- On the Concept of Agent in Multi-robot Environment.- An Approach for Autonomy: A Collaborative Communication Framework for Multi-agent Systems.- Autonomy Without Independence: Animal Training as a Model for Robot Design.- Shaping the Future of Online Payment Processing: An Autonomic Approach Applied to Intelligent Payment Brokers.- Genetically Modified Software: Realizing Viable Autonomic Agency.- Harnessing Self-modifying Code for Resilient Software.- Oracle: An Agent-Based, Reference Architecture.- Hierarchies, Holons, and Agent Coordination.- A Systemic Framework for Open Software Agents.- Hybrid System Reachability-Based Analysis of Dynamical Agents.- Distributed Agent Evolution with Dynamic Adaptation to Local Unexpected Scenarios.- Run-Time Agents as a Means of Reconciling Flexibility and Scalability of Services.- Concept and Sensor Network Approach to Computing: The Lexicon Acquisition Component.- An Agent Based Hybrid Analog-Digital Robotic Sensor Web Meta-system.- Harnessing Agent-Based Games Research for Analysis of Collective Agent Behavior in Critical Settings.- Defining Agents Via Strategies: Towards a View of MAS as Games.- Secure Mobile Agent Deployment and Communication Towards Autonomous Semantic Grid.- A System Theory Approach to the Representation of Mobile Digital Controllers Agents.- Towards Adaptive Migration Strategies for Mobile Agents.- Agent Modeling of Tetrahedron-Based Structures.- Congestion Control in Multi-Agent Systems Through Dynamic Games of Deterrence.- Radical Concepts for Self-managing Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing Environments.- Survivable Security Systems Through Autonomicity.

Overcoming Robotic Failures through Autonomicity

NASA is pursing ever increasing autonomous systems to perform new science and exploration. These missions will be out of contact with mission control for extended periods of time in very harsh and unforgiving environments. To successfully perform these missions autonomously, they will have to have autonomic properties. There have been recent studies of failures of robotic systems that examine how robots are failing in the field. By studying the types of failures that are occurring in robots autonomic properties can be developed for not only robots but for NASA autonomous missions to make them more robust. This paper examines the failures that were identified in a study of robot failures and maps them on to some autonomic properties that would address these failures. By classifying the failures and then mapping them to autonomic properties, classes of autonomic properties can be developed that can then be specialized for each particular mission

Systems of Systems Verification

To perform new science and exploration, NASA is proposing missions using multispacecraft where each spacecraft can act independently to perform a part of a mission but cannot complete it by itself. These missions are utilizing the concept of “System of Systems” that are being used to develop large systems made up of interacting components, each of which is a system in its own right. To develop these systems with a high level of assurance, new verification methods will be needed to address the added complexity resulting from the nondeterminate nature of these systems as well as emergent behavior. To support the level of assurance that NASA missions require, formal specification techniques and formal verification will play vital roles in the future development of NASA space exploration missions. The role of formal methods will be in the specification and analysis of forthcoming missions, enabling software assurance and proof of correctness of the system of systems behavior, whether or not this behavior is emergent. Formal models derived may also be used as the basis for automating the generation of much of the code for the mission to further reduce the cost and probability of adding new errors during coding.

Memetic Engineering as a Basis for Learning in Robotic Communities

This paper represents a new contribution to the growing literature on memes. While most memetic thought has been focused on its implications on humans, this paper speculates on the role that memetics can have on robotic communities. Though speculative, the concepts are based on proven advanced multi agent technology work done at NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center and Lockheed Martin. The paper is composed of the following sections : 1) An introductory section which gently leads the reader into the realm of memes. 2) A section on memetic engineering which addresses some of the central issues with robotic learning via memes. 3) A section on related work which very concisely identifies three other areas of memetic applications, i.e., news, psychology, and the study of human behaviors. 4) A section which discusses the proposed approach for realizing memetic behaviors in robots and robotic communities. 5) A section which presents an exploration scenario for a community of robots working on Mars. 6) A final section which discusses future research which will be required to realize a comprehensive science of robotic memetics.