Active Observer

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9307126 Bajcsy This is the first year of a three year continuing award. The research involves investigation of modeling, analysis and synthesis of visual behaviors of Active Observers. An Active Observer is a mobile agent whose task is to observe, and report/communicate information about the activity of another agent(s) whose task may be manipulation and/or navigation. Active Observers are part of a small team of agents who work together in a cooperative fashion. All agents in the team are equipped with visual navigation capabilities, but the tasks they are engaged in differ, depending on their role in the team and their goal. The agents could navigate independently or in a cooperative fashion (i.e. in the case of two manipulator agents carrying an object together). For manipulatory-agents navigating in a cooperative fashion, the issue of communication arises; hence, the problem of representing visual information for communication. The visual tasks of the observers-agents will differ depending on whether their observations serve for the navigation or manipulation purposes of the other agents. The main emphasis in this research is on the control structure that the observer must have in order to deliver the proper observations for the task at hand. For the purpose of modeling behaviors a formalism from the Discrete Events Systems (DES) theory has been adopted, suitable for investigating control-theoretic issues of a system. It is anticipated that the contribution of this research will be in: 1) modeling visually guided behaviors which tightly couple visual processing with control architecture; and 2) the identification of elementary behaviors needed for navigation and communication and their composition leading to more complex behaviors. Two kinds of elementary behaviors are distinguished, one where observations are directly connected with physical actions, and the other where observations and actions are either received or transmitted. The use of DES formalism allows the synthesis of complex behaviors in a systematic fashion and guarantees their controllability and observability