PASSI: Process for Agent Societies Specification and Implementation

PASSI (a Process for Agent Societies Specification and Implementation) is a step-by-step requirement-to-code methodology for designing and developing multiagent societies, integrating design models and concepts from both Object-Oriented software engineering and artificial intelligence approaches using the UML notation. The models and phases of PASSI encompass anthropomorphic representation of system requirements, social viewpoint, solution architecture, code production and reuse, and deployment configuration supporting mobility of agents. PASSI is made up of five models, concerning different design levels, and 12 activities performed to build multiagent systems. In PASSI, the UML notation i…

A heuristic for problem formalization in agent based simulation studies

Agent Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) is considered an effective approach for conducting simulation studies in many fields. In order to develop high quality simulation models, methodological approaches are demanded. In such direction we are moving by proposing a heuristic for the formalization of agent based simulation problems. The proposed heuristic is based on some guidelines developed for identifying the main elements of the problem domain description by analysing verbs and their common taxonomy in grammar.

Supporting Autonomy in Agent Oriented Methodologies

Designing a software solution for a complex systems is always a demanding task, it becomes much more complex if we consider to design a multi agent system where agents have to exhibit autonomy; which abstractions and which concepts to take into consideration when using a design methodology we would like to support autonomy? In this paper, we answer this question by studying and analyzing literature on the concept of agents in order to establish the basic set of concepts an agent oriented methodology has to deal with.

Recovering Sicilian Silk Heritage through Digital Technologies: The Case of Piraino’s Collection

Textile conservation has given rise to small and medium-sized museums, usually with scarce resources. In Sicily, the little evidence that remains of silk production and opulent imports by the rich and powerful local aristocracy is kept in museums, parishes, and other cultural institutions. The documentation, dissemination, and enhancement of such a fragile heritage is today possible by means of technological tools that provide novel means to preserve, analyze, and exploit digital information. In this paper, we present some outcomes of the SILKNOW project, a project that applies computing research to the needs of diverse users (museums, educational institutions, the tourism industry, creativ…

A Collaborative Tool for Designing and Enacting Design Processes

Today several approaches using Situational Method Engineering paradigm exist, each of them proposes methods and techniques for developing ad-hoc design processes. In this context heavy efforts were spent in the construction of appropriate tools that could help method engineers in producing a specific design process and in using it. We developed a tool called Metameth for supporting the design process definition and its enactment. Metameth is implemented as a multi-agent system, where each agent is capable of reasoning and adapting itself in order to support the designer in performing different kinds of design activities.

Toward Virtuous Machines: When Ethics Meets Robotics

In very few years, the rapid evolution in Robotics research will lead to the designing and developing of intelligent autonomous robots behaving like humans. Robots will become pervasive and soon become part of humans’ lives. Beyond the technological aspects, to reach these objectives, the researchers and the roboticists must propose novel theories and find how to implement them to allow robots to align with social, moral, and legal cues. Roboethics aims to discuss ethical problems related to the design and use of autonomous robots. It aims at defining the conduct codes to instill virtuous AI in robots. This paper aims to overview the available issues and the proposed approaches to face the …

Quantum Creativity and Cognition in Humans and Robots

In this research, we present a categorical framework to connect research on creativity and cognition for humans and robots, in light of the quantum paradigm. These fields and their relationships suggest a wider vision: modeling human creativity/cognition through quantum computing, and creating robots that can help us learn more about the humans themselves. We represent the human–robot comparison through functors (function generalization). Fundamental elements to understand human creativity are motivation and feedback as aesthetic pleasure. Is it possible to model it? Can the quantum paradigm help us in such an endeavor? We envisage the concept of emergence and quantum computing as decisive…

Modeling and designing a robotic swarm: A quantum computing approach

Nature is a neverending source of inspiration for technology. Quantum physics suggests applications to- ward quantum computing. Swarms’ self-organization leads to robotic swarm developments. Here, quantum computing is applied to swarm robotics. We model local interactions with a quantum circuit, testing it on simulators and quantum computers. To relate local with global behavior, we develop a block matrix-based model. Diagonal sub-matrices contain information on single robots; off-diagonal sub-matrices are the pairwise interaction terms. Comparing different swarms means comparing different block matrices. Choosing initial values and computation rules for off-diagonal blocks (with a particul…

A Norm-Governed Holonic Multi-agent System Metamodel

Modeling and designing systems that require a high level of coordination, control and automation is a very difficult task. The problem is the lack of design processes able to cover all the features these systems present. This paper presents an extension of the ASPECS metamodel for supporting organizational and normative principles and it allows to define models not only from an holonic agent viewpoint but also from a normative organization perspective. Moreover, our work emphasizes and makes it explicit the norms that regulate the structural, behavioral and finally adaptive aspect of an organizational system. The extended metamodel was experimented creating a Virtual Enterprise model for th…

Engineering Self-adaptive Systems: From Experiences with MUSA to a General Design Process

Designing and developing complex self-adaptive systems require design processes having specific features fitting and representing the complexity of these systems. Changing requirements, users’ needs and dynamic environment have to be taken in consideration, also considering that, due of the self-adaptive nature of the system, the solution is not fixed at design time but it is a run-time outcome. Traditional design approach and life cycles are not suitable to design software systems where requirements continuously change at runtime. A new design process paradigm is needed to design such systems. In this Chapter, we present a retrospective analysis based on three projects developed in the las…

Introduction

Nowadays, software engineers face a wide range of particular application domains such as electronic commerce, enterprise resource planning, mobile computing, self-organisation, pervasive and adaptive computing, etc. The resulting heterogeneity and required functionalities call for complex systems and open architectures that may evolve dynamically over time so as to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. This is probably one of the main reasons why the agent metaphor and agent-based computing are gaining momentum in these areas.

Common and Domain-specific Metamodel Elements for Problem Description in Simulation Problems

It is well known that the multi-agent system paradigm is well suited for modelling and developing simulations of complex systems belonging to several application domains. Simulation study aims at developing simulation models useful for representing, studying and analyzing entities and their behavior in a system according to specific purposes. With our work we are trying to understand what are the right elements to be considered and included in the description of a simulation problem. In order to root our resulting metamodel in the state of the art of multi-agent simulations we started from the study of twelve papers dealing with four different application domains: Crowd Dynamics, Traffic an…

Engineering multi-agent systems using feedback loops and holarchies

This paper presents a methodological approach for the engineering of Multi-Agent Systems using feedback loops as a first class concept in order to identify organizations. Feedback loops are a way for modeling complex systems that expose emergent behavior by means of a cause-effect loop between two levels called micro and macro levels of the system. The proposed approach principles consist in defining an abstract feedback loop pattern and providing activities and guidelines in order to identify and refine possible candidates for feedback loops during the analysis phase of the Aspecs methodology. This approach is illustrated by using an example drawn from the smart grid field.

The OpenUp Process

The Open Unified Process (OpenUp) is an iterative design process that structures the project lifecycle into four phases: Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition. It is part of the Eclipse Process Framework and embraces a pragmatic, agile philosophy that focuses on the collaborative nature of software development. It is a tools-agnostic, low-ceremony process that can be extended to address a broad variety of project types. The project lifecycle provides stakeholders and team members with visibility and decision points throughout the project and makes them able to manage their work through micro-increments.

Towards a design process for modeling MAS organizations

The design of MAS organizations is a complex activity where a proper methodological approach may offer a significant advantage in enabling the conception of the best solution. Moreover, the aid provided by a supporting tool significantly contributes to make the approach technically sound and it is a fundamental ingredient of a feasible strategy to the development of large MASs. In this paper, we introduce a portion of methodological approach devoted to design MAS organizations and a preliminary version of a specific case tool, named MoT (Moise+ Tool), for supporting activities from design production to automatic code generation. MoT provides four kinds of diagrams based on a definite graphi…

A collaborative tool for designing and enacting design processes

Today several approaches using Situational Method Engineering paradigm exist, each of them proposes methods and techniques for developing ad-hoc design processes. In this context heavy efforts were spent in the construction of appropriate tools that could help method engineers in producing a specific design process and in using it. We developed a tool called Metameth for supporting the design process definition and its enactment. Metameth is implemented as a multi-agent system, where each agent is capable of reasoning and adapting itself in order to support the designer in performing different kinds of design activities.

Automation Inner Speech as an Anthropomorphic Feature Affecting Human Trust: Current Issues and Future Directions

This paper aims to discuss the possible role of inner speech in influencing trust in human–automation interaction. Inner speech is an everyday covert inner monolog or dialog with oneself, which is essential for human psychological life and functioning as it is linked to self-regulation and self-awareness. Recently, in the field of machine consciousness, computational models using different forms of robot speech have been developed that make it possible to implement inner speech in robots. As is discussed, robot inner speech could be a new feature affecting human trust by increasing robot transparency and anthropomorphism.

THE METAMODEL: A STARTING POINT FOR DESIGN PROCESSES CONSTRUCTION

The construction of ad-hoc design processes following the Situational Method Engineering (SME) paradigm is currently carried out by adopting a set of phases for which, until now, no well defined techniques and guidelines have been established. The consequence is that organizations are very dependent on method designers' skills. In this paper, we propose an approach based on SME for constructing customized agent oriented design processes. Our approach adopts the metamodel as the most important factor leading to the selection and assembly of method fragments and an algorithm for establishing the instantiation order of metamodel elements. The algorithm makes the proposed approach repeatable a…

Simulation Goals and Metrics Identification

Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) is a very useful means for producing high quality models during simulation studies. When ABMS is part of a methodological ap- proach it becomes important to have a method for identifying the objectives of the simulation study in a disciplined fashion. In this work we propose a set of guidelines for properly capturing and representing the goals of the simulations and the metrics, allowing and evaluating the achievement of a simulation objective. We take inspiration from the goal-question-metric approach and with the aid of a specific problem formalization we are able to derive the right questions for relating simulation goals and metrics.

Composition of a New Process to Meet Agile Needs Using Method Engineering

The need of developing a new software engineering process to allow the quick prototyping of some robotic applications and meet the requests by some companies for a development process that was shorter than PASSI, gave us the opportunity of applying our studies on the assembling of a new SEP by reusing parts (called method fragments) from other processes. In this paper we discuss our approach that, starting from the method engineering paradigm, adapts and extends it considering specific agent-oriented issues like the multi-agent system meta-model. The final result of our experiment (Agile PASSI) is presented together with the requirements that motivated its structure. © Springer-Verlag Berli…

The Inner Life of a Robot in Human-Robot Teaming

Giving the robot a 'human' inner life, such as the capability to think about itself and to understand what the other team members are doing, would increase the efficiency of trustworthy interactions with the other members of the team. Our long-Term research goal is to provide the robot with a computational model of inner life helping the robot to reason about itself, its capabilities, its environment and its teammates. Robot inner speech is a part of the research goal. In this paper, we summarize the results obtained in this direction.

How to Extract Fragments from Agent Oriented Design Processes

Using Method Engineering for creating agent oriented design processes is a challenging task because of the lack of a fragment repository defined and filled starting from a shared and unique definition of fragment. The creation of a repository implies the fragmentation of existing agent design processes. In this paper we propose a set of guidelines for extracting fragments from agent design processes. The work is based on a precise definition of fragment and it aims to establish a method for fragmenting processes and obtaining homogeneous fragments regardless of how the starting design processes are defined and described. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

An Approach for the Design of Self-conscious Agent for Robotics

Developing complex robotic systems endowed with self- conscious abilities and subjective experience is a hard requirement to face at design time. This paper deals with the development of robotic systems that do not own any a-priori knowledge of the environment they live in and proposes an agent-orientd design process for modelling and implementing such a systems by means of implementing the perception loop occurring between environment, body and brain during subjective experience. A case study dealing with a robocup setup is proposed in order to describe the design process activities and to illustrate the techniques for making the robot able to autonomously decide when an unknown situations…

Capturing citizens — Emerging needs: Using social networks in smart cities

In order to reach its objectives, smart cities (or whatever kind of smart urban environment) should be underpinned by complex cyber physical systems (CPS) able to discover needs and services and "smartly" combine them. Services may be thought as services offered by software components, of whatever nature, for instance software, bot, robot, app and so on. Searching for the best service depends on the need of the citizen(s) and also on the type of (smart) environment the citizens are in. Analysis and design of CPSs are more challenging than the only physical or the only cyber system. We propose a design paradigm shift towards runtime for identifying requirements of cyber physical systems for …

A MAS metamodel-driven approach to process composition

Requirement analysis abstractions for AmI system design

Current trends in the AI’s evolution are going towards enriching environments with intelligence in order to support humans in their everyday life. AmI systems are plunged in the real world and humans expect to interact with them in a way that is similar to the one they have with other humans. In this kind of systems, where eliciting requirements involves several documents and stakeholders (mainly users that will be the first consumers of the system), the requirement analysis phase can be affected by incomplete, ambiguous and imprecise information. Hence, the need to find a fruitful way for knowledge management and its representation at design time. In this paper we propose a set of abstract…

Session details: Agent-oriented software engineering methodologies and systems track

Engineering multi-agent systems: State of affairs and the road ahead

International audience; The continuous integration of software-intensive systems together with the ever-increasing computing power offer a breeding ground for intelligent agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) more than ever before. Over the past two decades, a wide variety of languages, models, techniques and methodologies have been proposed to engineer agents and MAS. Despite this substantial body of knowledge and expertise, the systematic engineering of large-scale and open MAS still poses many challenges. Researchers and engineers still face fundamental questions regarding theories, architectures, languages, processes, and platforms for designing, implementing, running, maintaining, and e…

Representing social intelligence: An agent-based modeling application

Abstract Intelligent systems are composed of autonomous components that interact each others, with and through the environment, in order to give intelligent support for reaching specific objectives. In such kind of systems the environment is an active part of the system itself and provides input for runtime changing and adaptation. Modeling and representing systems like this is a hard task. In this paper we propose a biologically inspired approach that combined with the use of Agent-Based Modeling allows to create a means for analyzing emergent needs of the system at runtime and converting them into useful intelligent services to be provided. The experiment proposed for validating and illus…

Using and Extending the SPEM Specifications to Represent Agent Oriented Methodologies

Situational Method Engineering used for constructing ad-hoc agent oriented design processes is grounded on a well defined set of phases that are principally based on reuse of components coming from existing agent design processes; these components have to be stored in a repository. The identification and extraction of these components could take large advantages from the existence of a standardized representation of the design processes they come from. In this paper we illustrate our solution based on SPEM 2.0 specifications for modelling agent design processes and extending them when necessary to meet the specific needs we faced in our experiments.

Agents and robots for collaborating and supporting physicians in healthcare scenarios

Graphical abstract

Towards Filling the Gap Between AOSE Methodologies and Infrastructure: Requirements and Meta-Model

Many different methodologies have been proposed in Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) literature, and the concepts they rely on are different from those adopted when implementing the system. This conceptual gap often creates inconsistencies between specifications and implementation. We propose a metamodel-based approach that aims to bridge this gap, resulting in an integrated meta-model that merges the best aspects of four relevant AOSE methodologies (GAIA, Tropos, SODA and PASSI). The meta-model assembly followed a welldefined process: for each methodology to be integrated in the meta-model, we elicited the requirements, identified a set of process fragments, thoroughly compared th…

Representing and developing knowledge using Jason, CArtAgO and OWL

Contexts where agents and humans are required to collaborate and cooperate in a human-like fashion are complex systems where a high degree of self-adaptability of every component is demanding. A fundamental ingredient when developing and implementing this kind of systems is the knowledge representation. Knowledge of the goals, the environment, other agents' capabilities and task and of itself, is crucial in deciding which action to perform to reach an objective and to behave in a self-adaptive way. The problem of knowledge modeling and representation becomes more and more urgent if the agents' operation domain changes at runtime. Knowledge has to be updated and handled while the system is i…

Software Design of an AGI System Based on Perception Loop

According to the externalist approach, subjective experience hypothesizes a processual unity between the activity in the brain and the perceived event in the external world. A perception loop therefore occurs among the brain's activitie8 and the external world. In our work the metaphor of test is employed to create a software de8ign methodology for implementing an AGI system endowed with the perception loop. Preliminary experiments with a NAO humanoid robots are reported.

Robots as intelligent assistants to face COVID-19 pandemic

AbstractMotivationThe epidemic at the beginning of this year, due to a new virus in the coronavirus family, is causing many deaths and is bringing the world economy to its knees. Moreover, situations of this kind are historically cyclical. The symptoms and treatment of infected patients are, for better or worse even for new viruses, always the same: more or less severe flu symptoms, isolation and full hygiene. By now man has learned how to manage epidemic situations, but deaths and negative effects continue to occur. What about technology? What effect has the actual technological progress we have achieved? In this review, we wonder about the role of robotics in the fight against COVID. It p…

A Biologically Inspired Representation of the Intelligence of a University Campus

Abstract Intelligence or smartness in an urban environment implies several factors directed to improve quality of life and efficiency. It is important to note that in this context the inclusion of citizens and their devices is a key factor for reaching smartness. Data from mobile devices are increasingly used in everyday activities and have to be considered a useful means for handling and analyzing knowledge and communications. This paper shows how to represent important data when dealing with smartness by creating an analogy between the representation of human brain areas, activated when specific tasks are performed, and groups of students when behaviors or needs arise. The brain traffic c…

Self-conscious robotic system design process-from analysis to implementation

Developing robotic systems endowed with self-conscious capabilities means realizing complex sub-systems needing ad-hoc software engineering techniques for their modelling, analysis and implementation. In this chapter the whole process (from analysis to implementation) to model the development of self-conscious robotic systems is presented and the new created design process, PASSIC, supporting each part of it, is fully illustrated. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Designing MAS Organizations with the support of a UML CASE tool

Agents in dynamic contexts, a system for learning plans

Reproducing the human ability to cooperate and collaborate in a dynamic environment is a significant challenge in the field of human-robot teaming interaction. Generally, in this context, a robot has to adapt itself to handle unforeseen situations. The problem is runtime planning when some factors are not known before the execution starts. This work aims to show and discuss a method to handle this kind of situation. Our idea is to use the Belief-Desire-Intention agent paradigm, its the Jason reasoning cycle and a Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System. The result is a novel method that gives the robot the ability to select the best plan.

A Notation for Modeling Jason-Like BDI Agents

The design and development of a large Multi Agent System (MAS) is a complex and difficult activity where a proper modeling notation may offer a significant contribution to the formulation of the best solution. The support provided by a specific CASE tool can significantly contribute to make the chosen approach technically valid and it is also a fundamental element of a feasible development strategy. The present work reports a UML profile and the related graphical notation for describing a MAS based on the Jason meta model. Moreover a specific CASE tool has been developed for supporting MASs design and automatic code generation. The proposed notation is shown in details using a classical exa…

Decision Process in Human-Agent Interaction: Extending Jason Reasoning Cycle

The main characteristic of an agent is acting on behalf of humans. Then, agents are employed as modeling paradigms for complex systems and their implementation. Today we are witnessing a growing increase in systems complexity, mainly when the presence of human beings and their interactions with the system introduces a dynamic variable not easily manageable during design phases. Design and implementation of this type of systems highlight the problem of making the system able to decide in autonomy. In this work we propose an implementation, based on Jason, of a cognitive architecture whose modules allow structuring the decision-making process by the internal states of the agents, thus combini…

Quantum planning for swarm robotics

Computational resources of quantum computing can enhance robotic motion, decision making, and path planning. While the quantum paradigm is being applied to individual robots, its approach to swarms of simple and interacting robots remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we attempt to bridge the gap between swarm robotics and quantum computing, in the framework of a search and rescue mission. We focus on a decision-making and path-planning collective task. Thus, we present a quantum-based path-planning algorithm for a swarm of robots. Quantization enters position and reward information (measured as a robot’s proximity to the target) and path-planning decisions. Pairwise information-exchan…

A MAS metamodel-driven approach to process fragments selection

The construction of ad-hoc design processes is more and more required today. In this paper we present our approach for the construction of a new design process following the Situational Method Engineering paradigm. We mainly focus on the selection and assembly activities on the base of what we consider a key element in agent design processes: the MAS metamodel. The paper presents an algorithm establishing a priority order in the realization (instantiation) of MAS metamodel elements by the fragments that will compose the new process.

The Role of Ontology in Agent-Oriented Requirements Analysis

Knowledge acquisition through introspection in Human-Robot Cooperation

Abstract When cooperating with a team including humans, robots have to understand and update semantic information concerning the state of the environment. The run-time evaluation and acquisition of new concepts fall in the critical mass learning. It is a cognitive skill that enables the robot to show environmental awareness to complete its tasks successfully. A kind of self-consciousness emerges: the robot activates the introspective mental processes inferring if it owns a domain concept or not, and correctly blends the conceptual meaning of new entities. Many works attempt to simulate human brain functions leading to neural network implementation of consciousness; regrettably, some of thes…

Metamodeling: Representing and modeling system knowledge in design processes

Robot's Inner Speech Effects on Trust and Anthropomorphic Cues in Human-Robot Cooperation

Inner Speech is an essential but also elusive human psychological process which refers to an everyday covert internal conversation with oneself. We argue that programming a robot with an overt self-talk system, which simulates human inner speech, might enhance human trust by improving robot transparency and anthropomorphism. For this reasons, this work aims to investigate if robot’s inner speech, here intended as overt self-talk, affects human trust and anthropomorphism when human and robot cooperate. A group of participants was engaged in collaboration with the robot. During cooperation, the robot talks to itself. To evaluate if the robot’s inner speech influences human trust, two question…

A general theoretical framework for designing cognitive architectures: Hybrid and meta-level architectures for BICA

In this paper, we will discuss hybrid architectures in which different processing modules coexist and cooperate in a principled way. A fundamental and essential role is played by modules performing meta-computation, i.e., computation about computation itself. Meta-level architectures, therefore, become an essential complement of hybrid architectures for biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA). Engineering and modeling BICAs is a hard task due to the lack of techniques for developing and implementing their features. We propose a new concept of intelligent agent as a useful abstraction for developing BICAs and having means for representing all the involved entities together with …

Method fragments for agent design methodologies: from standardisation to research

The method engineering paradigm enables designers to reuse portions of design processes (called method fragments or chunks in literature) to build processes that are expressly tailored for realising a system that is specific for some problem or development context. This paper initially reports on the standardisation attempt carried out by the FIPA Methodology Technical Committee (TC) and then presents the research activities we did starting from that work; these resulted in a slightly different definition of some of the most important elements of the approach in order to support a multiview representation of the fragment (the views are process, reuse, storing and implementation). The paper …

Quantum RoboSound: Auditory Feedback of a Quantum-Driven Robotic Swarm

Data sonification enhance and enrich information understanding with an additional sensory dimension. Sonification also opens the way to more creative applications, joining arts and sciences. In this study, we present sequences of chords obtained as auditory feedback from the trajectories of a robotic swarm. The swarm behavior is an emerging effect from simple local interactions and autonomous decisions of each robot. The swarm effect can be identified through sonification outcomes in terms of voice leading patterns. Thus, chord patterns represent behavior patterns. The convergence to the target is represented by the convergence to a specific pitch. The swarm decision process is based upon q…

The four types of self-adaptive systems: A metamodel

The basic ideas of self-adaptive systems are not a novelty in computer science. There are plenty of systems that are able of monitoring their operative context to take run-time decisions. However, more recently a new research discipline is trying to provide a common framework for collecting theory, methods, middlewares, algorithms and tools for engineering such software systems. The aim is to collect and classify existing approaches, coming from many different research areas. The objective of this work is providing a unified metamodel for describing the various categories of adaptation.

The IEEE-FIPA Standard on the Design Process Documentation Template

Nowadays, it is a matter of fact that a “one-size-fit-all” methodology or design process useful and fitting every kind of problem, situation, or design context does not exist. (Situational) Method Engineering (SME) discipline aims at determining techniques and tools for developing ad hoc design methodologies. SME mainly and highly focuses on the reuse of portion of existing design processes or methodologies (the method fragments). In order to have means for creating SME techniques and tools and for creating new design processes, some key elements are needed: a unique process metamodel for representing design processes and fragments, a proper template for the description of AO design process…

Robot’s Inner Speech Effects on Human Trust and Anthropomorphism

AbstractInner Speech is an essential but also elusive human psychological process that refers to an everyday covert internal conversation with oneself. We argued that programming a robot with an overt self-talk system that simulates human inner speech could enhance both human trust and users’ perception of robot’s anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, intelligence and safety. For this reason, we planned a pre-test/post-test control group design. Participants were divided in two different groups, one experimental group and one control group. Participants in the experimental group interacted with the robot Pepper equipped with an over inner speech system whereas participants in the control …

The Sound of Swarm. Auditory Description of Swarm Robotic Movements

Movements of robots in a swarm can be mapped to sounds, highlighting the group behavior through the coordinated and simultaneous variations of musical parameters across time. The vice versa is also possible: sound parameters can be mapped to robotic motion parameters, giving instructions through sound. In this article, we first develop a theoretical framework to relate musical parameters such as pitch, timbre, loudness, and articulation (for each time) with robotic parameters such as position, identity, motor status, and sensor status. We propose a definition of musical spaces as Hilbert spaces, and musical paths between parameters as elements of bigroupoids, generalizing existing conceptio…

The PASSI and Agile PASSI MAS Meta-models Compared with a Unifying Proposal

A great number of processes for multi-agent systems design have been presented in last years to support the different approaches to agent-oriented design; each process is specific for a particular class of problems and it instantiates a specific MAS meta-model. These differences produce inconsistences and overlaps: a MAS meta-model may define a term not referred by another, or the same term can be used with a different meaning. We think that the lack of a standardization may cause a significant delay to the diffusion of the agent paradigm outside research context. Working for this unification goal, it is also necessary to define in unambiguous way the terms of the agent model and their rela…

Agent-Oriented Software Patterns for Rapid and Affordable Robot Programming

Robotic systems are often quite complex to develop: they are huge, heavily constrained from the nonfunctional point of view and they implement challenging algorithms. The lack of integrated methods with reuse approaches leads robotic developers to reinvent the wheel each time a new project starts. This paper proposes to reuse the experience done when building robotic applications, by catching it into design patterns. These represent a general mean for (i) reusing proved solutions increasing the final quality, (ii) communicating the knowledge about a domain and (iii) reducing the development time and effort. Despite of this generality, the proposed repository of patterns is specific for mult…

How to engineer biologically inspired cognitive architectures

Biologically inspired cognitive architectures are complex systems where different modules of cognition interact in order to reach the global goals of the system in a changing environment. Engineering and modeling this kind of systems is a hard task due to the lack of techniques for developing and implementing features like learning, knowledge, experience, memory, adaptivity in an inter-modular fashion. We propose a new concept of intelligent agent as abstraction for developing biologically cognitive architectures. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

A metrics suite for evaluating agent-oriented architectures

The Multi-agent Systems (MASs) paradigm continues to consolidate itself as a new branch of software engineering. Traditional software engineering strongly recommends to apply metrics in software developments. However, several research groups of experts in agent-oriented software engineering agree that classical software metrics and object-oriented metrics cannot directly measure the quality of MAS architectures. For this reason, this work proposes a suite of metrics to measure certain quality attributes of MAS architectures, considering agents and their organization. Most of these metrics are inspired by object-oriented metrics but they are adapted to agent-oriented concepts. Proposed metri…

A Proposal of Process Fragment Definition and Documentation

This paper focuses on the field of Situational Method Engineering (SME) for the construction of agent-oriented design processes. Whatever SME approach a method designer wants to use, he has to manage two main elements: the (method or process) fragment and the repository where it is stored. Specific fragment definition and documentation are fundamental during these activities, for new process composition, and for the consequent system design activities. This paper aims at illustrating a proposal of fragment definition and documentation. This proposal is aimed to be an input for the IEEE FIPA Design Process Documentation and Fragmentation working group and, as regards our own research work, t…

An Expert System for the Design of Agents

The growing interest for the design and development of multi-agent systems has brought to the creation of a specific research area called Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), specifically conceived for the development of complex systems. The development of such systems needs the support of appropriate tools that could help the designer in producing the design artefacts. We developed a tool called Metameth that may be used to define a new (agent-oriented) design process as well as to apply it. In this paper, we describe only a slice of this complex tool, specifically addressing the interaction with human actors (the designers). This subsystem is conceived as a collaborative multi-agen…

FROM MODELING TO IMPLEMENTING THE PERCEPTION LOOP IN SELF-CONSCIOUS SYSTEMS

Engineering self-conscious robotic systems is a challenging issue because of the intrinsic complexity of such systems; a self-conscious robot has to acquire knowledge, to understand its world and to autonomously interact with its environment. In this paper, the externalist point of view is used for developing a complete process for the design and implementation of a conscious robotic system that is able to interact with a dynamic environment in a human-like fashion without possessing detailed knowledge about the environment and pre-programmed tasks and algorithms. The paper mainly focuses on the configuration part of the whole process that make the robot able to decide and to learn from exp…

Categories, Quantum Computing, and Swarm Robotics: A Case Study

The swarms of robots are examples of artificial collective intelligence, with simple individual autonomous behavior and emerging swarm effect to accomplish even complex tasks. Modeling approaches for robotic swarm development is one of the main challenges in this field of research. Here, we present a robot-instantiated theoretical framework and a quantitative worked-out example. Aiming to build up a general model, we first sketch a diagrammatic classification of swarms relating ideal swarms to existing implementations, inspired by category theory. Then, we propose a matrix representation to relate local and global behaviors in a swarm, with diagonal sub-matrices describing individual featur…

Handbook on Agent-Oriented Design Processes

To deal with the flexible architectures and evolving functionalities of complex modern systems, the agent metaphor and agent-based computing are often the most appropriate software design approach. As a result, a broad range of special-purpose design processes has been developed in the last several years to tackle the challenges of these specific application domains. In this context, in early 2012 the IEEE-FIPA Design Process Documentation Template SC0097B was defined, which facilitates the representation of design processes and method fragments through the use of standardized templates, thus supporting the creation of easily sharable repositories and facilitating the composition of new des…