Data processing: artificial intelligence – Adaptive system
Reexamination Certificate
2000-10-25
2004-01-06
Davis, George B. (Department: 2121)
Data processing: artificial intelligence
Adaptive system
C700S250000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06675156
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a robotic teleportation method and to a teleportation system for autonomous robotic agents.
In present practice, a robot has a physical architecture (body, sensors, actuators) and a control program executed on a computer or special-purpose electronic device that gives the robot its functional capabilities. The robot is called autonomous if it executes these control programs without human intervention and if it adapts its control programs to be maximally adapted to its environment and tasks. The control program is generally associated with a specific physical body, particularly if the control program has been specialized by adaptation, learning mechanisms or other means to individualize the robot.
2. Technical Background
There are several related concepts and mechanisms which act as background to the present invention.
There has been significant work in the area of tele-operated robots, where a human can control a robot from a distance. In this case, the sensory states of the robot are extracted and sent through a data transmission system to another physical location for interpretation by a human operator. The human operator then sends control commands to the robot attain through a data transmission network. Teleoperation requires a robotic architecture in which sensory and actuator states are made accessible to outside processes. In the case of teleoperation, the robot is not autonomous because it remains under human control. Accordingly, in teleoperated robots, the control program is not executed by the robot itself on local computational resources without human intervention.
Another relevant area with a significant state of the art is that of net-mobile programs. These are computer programs that can be transferred between host devices across a network, and then executed on a local device. A Java applet, for example, is a portable computer program that executes in a host device (typically a Web browser). However, a net-mobile program such as a Java applet that implements a button or an image map is not autonomous; it is down-loaded on demand, responds to user actions, and is then purged from memory when the user moves on. Moreover, a net-mobile program is not persistent, i.e. the net-mobile program does not have a definite lifetime which lasts more than a single invocation and in the case of mobile programs, there is no need to adjust their internal states.
A third relevant area of prior work is concerned with software agents. Software agents are systems that exhibit autonomy and persistence and thus capture some of the properties of teleportable agents. Various proposals have been made for software agents and various experiments have been carried out.
There are two significant differences here. First, mobility is not a necessary characteristic of software agents. Many software agents are not transferred between host devices at all. Others may exhibit what we call pseudo-mobility they make use of data drawn from remote sources, but are not themselves transferred. The <<spiders>> or <<crawlers>> used to index the World Wide Web are examples of pseudo-mobile programs; they make use of remote data, but despite their name—with its suggestion of movement—transfer from one host to another prior to execution plays no part in their normal way of operating. A smaller number of agents may be truly mobile but it is clear that mobility is not an inherent part of the definition of a software agent.
The second, and much more important distinction, is that software agents are typically not grounded. They operate within an information space which is defined by stored data, not by data derived in real time from sensors or actuators.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention aims at dissociating the functional capabilities and thus the behavioral identity of the robot from its physical embodiment in such a way that it can be sent over a data transmission network such as the Internet and downloaded (materialized) or extracted (dematerialized) in different robotic bodies. Such a capability is called agent teleportation. The behavioral identity of a robot is called the agent, and the physical installation in which an agent can be embodied is called the robot body. A teleportable robotic agent is an agent which can be embodied into a robot body as well as travel over a data transmission network.
Robotic teleportation has a wide range of possible applications. Physical robot bodies linked through the Internet are expected to become common place in the future, and individuals will own agents which can operate these robotic structures but are not tied to a single physical robot. Such agents can do tasks in the physical world or interact with other embodied agents in many different physical locations without the need to travel physically from one location to the next.
For example. <<pet robots>> which have the capacity for autonomous movement and basic sound and vision acquisition devices (such as the dog-shaped miniature Aibo robot, made by Sony Corporation) are increasingly coming to tile market. Based on the invention described in this application, such small mobile robots could connect intermittently to a network in order to download agents which act as control programs for the robot. Under direction from the controlling agent, the robot explores its immediate surroundings. The image and sound data that it captures are used to allow the agent to <<learn>> (e.g. by constructing maps of the world, or learning—in interaction with other robots or human users—names for identifiable objects like faces in the world). The robot can then connect to a network access port and upload the agent and its newly-acquired knowledge about the world. This opens possibilities for backup, maintenance, monitoring, and upgrading of agents without the need for users to manually save or restore agents or install new software. Moreover owners of pet robots could exchange agents or parts of agents, or individuals could have agents interact in other locations thus increasing the entertainment potential of pet robots.
Another application is in speech. A speech system can be seen as an agent that controls a synthesizer and perceives human speech through a microphone. In contrast to much of current technology, we expect future speech agents to continuously adapt and specialize to the human speech in their environment. This means that their internal states change to record new words, new pronunciations, etc. By the invention described in the present application it is possible for individuals to own a speech agent which is highly adapted to their speech or to the speech of people that the individuals have to interact with. Such a speech agent can install itself on any machine that has the appropriate hardware in a location where its user is physically located. It is also possible for speech agents that have been in other environments to install themselves somewhere where their expertise is most needed and act as transcribers.
Briefly, the present invention applies to grounded mobile agents and differs from teleoperation in that the agent is autonomous, pursuing its defined goals independently of a human operator. Thus, according to the present invention, the control program is executed by the robot itself on local computational resources without human intervention.
The agents according to the invention differ from standard net-mobile programs in that they are also persistent. Their internal state and structure is maintained between invocations. Thus an assent has a definite lifetime which lasts more than a single invocation of the agent. Moreover, autonomous agents must be able to adjust their own representations and internal states as they learn through a series of successive interactions.
The agents according to the invention further differ from conventional software agents in that they are necessarily mobile and necessarily grounded. Thus, the agents are embodied in the real world and have
Kaplan Frederic
McIntyre Angus
Steels Luc
Davis George B.
Frommer William S.
Frommer & Lawrence & Haug LLP
Smid Dennis M.
Sony France S.A.
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