Title: Background sensing control for planning agents working in the real world

Authors: Hisashi Hayashi, Seiji Tokura, Fumio Ozaki, Miwako Doi

Addresses: Corporate Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corporation, 1 Komukai Toshiba-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki 212-8582, Japan. ' Corporate Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corporation, 1 Komukai Toshiba-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki 212-8582, Japan. ' Corporate Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corporation, 1 Komukai Toshiba-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki 212-8582, Japan. ' Corporate Research and Development Center, Toshiba Corporation, 1 Komukai Toshiba-cho, Saiwai-ku, Kawasaki 212-8582, Japan

Abstract: Online planning agents can adapt to the dynamic environment by continuously modifying plans during the plan execution. This adaptability of the online planning agents is based on the assumption that they can recognise the events happening in the environment. However, robotic agents working in the real environment cannot obtain necessary information from the outer world by simply turning all sensors on while executing a plan. They have to actively sense the world by changing the direction of the sensor to the target, analysing the raw sensor data, extracting important information and recognising the situation. Online planning is useless if they cannot obtain necessary information from the world. Therefore, it is crucial to decide what events the agent needs to recognise in the background while executing a plan. To solve this problem, this paper introduces a new background sensing control technique by which planning agents can effectively observe the real environment and obtain important information when necessary during the plan execution.

Keywords: online planning agents; robotics; effective event observation; sensing control; background sensing; intelligent information systems; robot sensors; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; MAS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2009.030441

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2009 Vol.3 No.4, pp.483 - 501

Received: 09 Sep 2008
Accepted: 18 Apr 2009
Published online: 16 Dec 2009 *

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