Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Operations in six degrees of freedom (with neutral buoyancy or weight-
lessness)
•
Operations with limited communications bandwidth
The group's research has focused on intelligent control for autonomous sys-
tems and cooperative task assignments, determining what has to be commu-
nicated during cooperative problem solving, and developing a low-bandwidth
conceptual language for cooperative problem solving. In one project, a col-
lection of underwater autonomous vehicles collect data in the ocean and can
create a 3-D image of the area of interest. Connected through low bandwidth
acoustic modems or radio links, the vehicles coordinate their sampling activ-
ities and results reporting.
7.6.3 Knowledge Sharing Effort
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), now named the DARPA,
sponsored the Knowledge Sharing Effort (KSE). KSE developed methodolo-
gies and software for the sharing and reuse of knowledge [
106
] in support of
communication between autonomous systems. KSE was broken up into three
separate efforts.
•
Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML) is a language for
exchanging information and knowledge between agents [
24
]. It prescribes
a set of performatives that represent different types of agent communica-
tion actions (like ask or tell). KQML coordinates the exchange of these
performatives between agents.
•
Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) is a formal computer language de-
signed for exchanging complex knowledge between agents [
44
]. It has
declarative semantics and allows the agents to exchange information and
describe how that information should be interpreted (the definitions of
objects, the meaning of relationships, etc.).
•
The final effort is the development of deep knowledge bases for domains of
interest. These knowledge bases will have definitions for objects of interest,
define relationships and concepts, and populate the knowledge bases with
important objects.
KSE is highlighted here because it was a long-term ARPA/DARPA project
to build formal mechanisms for agent communication. In building their lan-
guages and systems, the researchers had to address issues that any group of
collaborating agents would have to address.
7.6.4 DIS and HLA
The military has developed a series of high quality training and simulation
systems, which involve the fighting soldier in a detailed model of the area
of combat. The efforts began in the early 1980s with SimNet [
6
,
48
], which
