Robots

Robot-Virtual-agent interaction

So there would be a variety of robots.  There would be lots of mini scouter robots.  These types of robots would be distributed throughout the grid.  Their job would be to detect when a break occurs in the wire and then to determine the exact location.  Then they would alert their commander and then either provide safety fixes, like cutting and capping wires or just setting up safety perimeters so no one gets hurt.  Then with the information gathered by the scouts (pictures/video, electrical data, course taken ie cutting or capping wires, approximate number customers affected) the commander can determine which robots to send out to fix the problem.  The decision to send out the type of robot will be done by a virtual agent.  However, a human will receive the info as well in order to determine whether emergency teams should be deployed to rescue any injured people.

 

Agent-Robot Interaction and app idea

I think that the AI would be able to jump around and that it would have access to various other AI like functions like vision, planning, scheduling, communication that reside on the system that it is interacting with.  However, its behavior, decision making, goals, history, higher-level learning ability would be part of itself. Therefore, it would interface with the rest of the system that way.  Therefore, the agent-robot-interaction would be simplified and would allow the system to be seamless between real and virtual environments and would allow code reuse and modularity in the system.

The interface may be agent based (meaning the interface itself has goals, priorities, behaviors and an environment).

It also lends itself to distributed AI when there are multiple agents trying to interact with the same system.  Meaning how does the system determine who gets to use what when resources are limited.  Then there is the multiagent system aspect of when the agents are trying to do things that require cooperation.  Trying to determine who does what with what systems. Especially when you are all possibly different and some may have more experience doing certain tasks than other agents. Also, forming hierarchies would be important.

I think that this might have applications in areas like smart grid.  Where there are robots that are repairmen and essentially what happens is this:  We have some robots they are specialized (heterogeneous) and there is a hierarchy within the grid that can send out …  more on this later.

You should be able to txt your order to fast food and sub shops.  Or a universal ordering app.  The place would just subscribe to the website as a service and the site would have a standard way to order things.

ST-SR-IA number of robots

An interesting tidbit quote on the optimal assignment problem (aka ST–SR–IA:Single-Task Robots, Single-RobotTasks, Instantaneous Assignment, the multirobot task allocation problem):

“Thus, for small-scale to medium-scale systems, say n< 200, a broadcast-based centralized assignment solution is likely the better choice” [1].

Note that n is the number of robots.  This is an interesting assertion and is backed up by their experiments.  They had 300 robots and 300 tasks and they used the Hungarian method to do the task distribution it ran in under 1 second and that was on a Pentium III 700 MHz machine!

[1]  Gerkey, B. P. (2004). A Formal Analysis and Taxonomy of Task Allocation in Multi-Robot Systems. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 23(9), 939–954. doi:10.1177/0278364904045564

 

Brian Gerkey is pretty cool http://www.ai.sri.com/~gerkey/index.php?src=pubs http://robotics.stanford.edu/~gerkey/

Secure Task Allocation Scheme

In the future the robots that are being used will most likely be common enough that anyone could purchase one and given enough knowledge infiltrate a system of robots.  Currently the level of security in task allocation methods for robots is like that of communication of localization data between large ships, nonexistent.  Methods for attack:

1. Steal a robot already being used either physically or remote hijacking

2. Wifi comm interference device (take out communication)

3. Plant an identical robot in the group.  Requires the ability of the robot to quickly integrate an become part of the group.  Once involved reconnaissance and

4.  Mirroring (man in the middle), essentially take control of the entire swarm and provide limited, looped or custom access/control to legal owners.

I’m sure there are many more.  These are the first four that came to mind.  I know that this is not something that needs to happen right now, but it is something that needs to be considered as more and more people and institutions start using robots.  Just as people hack smart phones and regular computers there will be even more incentive to hack and infiltrate robots.

So, how would you go about securing robots?  This seems like a very tough problem without constant surveillance to notify you of such things.  But then who watches the watchers as they like to say…