The Problem of Signal and Symbol Integration A Study of Cooperative Mobile Autonomous Agent.pdfVIP

The Problem of Signal and Symb ol Integration A Study of Co op erative Mobile Autonomous Agent Behaviors Ruzena Ba jcsy and Jana Kosec ka GRASP Lab oratory Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania Walnut Street C Philadelp hi a PA Abstract This pap er explores and reasons ab out the interplay b etween symb olic and continuous representations We rst provide some histor ical p ersp ective on the signal and symb ol integration as viewed by the Articial Intelligence AI Rob otics and Computer Vision communities The domain of autonomous rob otic agents residing in the dynamically changing environments anchors well dierent asp ects of this integration and allows us to lo ok at the problem in its entirety Mo dels of reasoning sensing and control actions of such agents determine three dierent di mensions for discretization of the agentworld b ehavioral state space The design and mo deling of rob otic agents where these three asp ects have to b e closely tied together provide a go o d exp erimental platform for addressing the signaltosymb oltosi gn al transformation problem We present some exp erimental results from the domain of co op erating mo bile agents involved in tasks of navigation and manipulation Intro duction To motivate the main topic of this pap er we b egin with the assumption that agents live b ehave and carry out certain tasks in a physical and dynamically changing environment The issue we want to reason ab out here is one of repre sentation and mo deling of autonomous agents We wish to argue that one needs