A UML-based notation for representing MAS organizations

A notation for representing agents' organizations to be implemented using Moise+ and Jason is proposed. For this purpose a UML profile was defined for representing the elements of Moise+ organizational model such as role, mission and group. The proposed notation will be fully illustrated and applied to the classical example provided by the J-Moise+ team.

Towards The Adoption of a Perception-Driven Perspective in the Design of Complex Robotic Systems

Awareness and autonomous interaction with the environment in a robotic system is the base of the new discipline of machine consciousness. In this paper we present the results of a first attempt in order to engineer these robotic systems by applying a Situational Method Engineering approach that extends PASSI and to create a model for conscious systems.

Personality and learning in robots. The role of individual motivations/expectations/ emotions in robot adaptive behaviours.

An emotional humanoid partner

In this paper we propose an emotional humanoid robot based on Latent Semantic Analysis, that exhibits an emotional behaviour in the interaction with human. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) paradigm is capable to encode the semantics of words using a statistical computation of a large corpus of text. We illustrate how the creation and the use of this emotional conceptual space allows the building of “Latent Semantic Behaviour” because it simulates the emotional associative capabilities of human beings. The presented approach integrates traditional knowledge representation and intuitive capabilities provided by geometric and sub-symbolic information modelling. To validate the effectiveness of t…

Standardisation of Artificial Intelligence: Making a “New World” Brave, with Support of Human Requirements in a Machine Intelligence Environment

In line with previous industrial revolutions, standardisation must accompany the deployment of artificial intelligence systems that promise to revolutionise the way we live (home automation, autonomous vehicles, EdTech, etc.) and work (collaborative industrial robots, agricultural robots, inspection and maintenance robots, LegalTech, FinTech, etc.). The standards produced and promoted in Europe will be resolutely geared towards the protection of people and property, thus promoting the acceptability of these intelligent systems and the common interest. They will have to cover the requirements expected of AIs, but also the means and methods for assessing them. The new standards will have to c…

Planning by imagination in Cicerobot, a robot for museum tours

An emotional storyteller robot

DAISY: a distributed architecture for intelligent SYstem

Distributed perceptual systems are endowed with different kind of sensors, from which information flows to suitable modules to perform useful elaborations for decisions making. In this paper a new distributed architecture, named 'Distributed Architecture for Intelligent SYstem' (DAISY), is proposed. It is based on the concept of co-operating behavioral agents supervised by a 'Central Engagement Module'. This module integrates the processing of data coming from the behavioral agents with a symbolic level of representation, by the introduction of a 'conceptual space' intermediate analogue representation. The DAISY project is under development; experiments on navigation and exploration for an …

Un'architettura robotica per l'honest signalling nell'interazione uomo-umanoide

Questo contributo descrive l’architettura di un sistema di rilevazione e classificazione integrato con robot umanoidi per specificare una classe di segnali biologicamente rilevanti che contribuiscono a rendere l’interazione con l’uomo naturale e affidabile. Si presenterà inizialmente la teoria biologica dell’honest signalling e quindi la sua estensione nella sociometrics. Infine, si illustreranno i moduli dell’architettura progettata come genera- trice di modelli di percezione sociale testabili per una classe delimitata di segnali sociali. This paper describes the architecture of a detection and classification humanoid integrated system, which is designed to specify one class of biologicall…

From PASSI to agile PASSI: Tailoring a design process to meet new needs

From several years we are developing robotic multiagent systems according to well defined design methodologies. These methodologies evolved over time because of the changes in the operating environments (robotic hardware and software platforms) and specific missions accomplished by our robots. In the last four years we used PASSI (Process for Agent Societies Specification and Implementation) obtaining good results but, the growing experience and day by day accelerating changes in requirements suggested us to find a new and more versatile approach. In this context we developed the Agile PASSI methodology discussed in this paper; it is an agile process built up capitalizing all the experience…

Neural Networks as Soft Sensors: a Comparison in a Real World Application.

Physical atmosphere parameters, as temperature or humidity, can be indirectly estimated on the surface of a monument by means of soft sensors based on neural networks, if an ambient air monitoring station works in the neighborhood of the monument itself. Since the soft sensors work as virtual instruments, the accuracy of such measurements has to be analyzed and validated from statistical and metrological points of view. The paper compares different typologies of neural networks, which can be used as soft sensors in a complex real world application: a non invasive monitoring of the conservation state of old monuments. In this context, several designed connessionistic systems, based on radial…

Perceptual Anchoring via Conceptual Spaces

Perceptual anchoring is the problem of creating and maintaining in time the connection between symbols and sensor data that refer to the same physical objects. This is one of the facets of the general problem of integrating symbolic and non-symbolic processes in an intelligent system. Gärdenfors’ conceptual spaces provide a geometric treatment of knowledge which bridges the gap between the symbolic and subsymbolic approaches. As such, they can be used for the study of the anchoring problem. In this paper, we propose a computational framework for anchoring based on conceptual spaces. Our framework exploits the geometric structure of conceptual spaces for many of the crucial tasks of anchorin…

Inner speech for a self-conscious robot

The experience self-conscious thinking in the verbose form of inner speech is a common one. Such a covert dialogue accompanies the introspection of mental life and fulfills important roles in our cognition, such as self-regulation, self-restructuring, and re-focusing on attentional resources. Although the functional underpinning and the phenomenology of inner speech are largely investigated in psychological and philosophical fields, robotic research generally does not address such a form of self-conscious behavior. Existing models of inner speech inspire computational tools to provide the robot with a form of self-consciousness. Here, the most widespread psychological models of inner speech…

Autonomous acquisition of natural language

An important part of human intelligence is the ability to use language. Humans learn how to use language in a society of language users, which is probably the most effective way to learn a language from the ground up. Principles that might allow an artificial agents to learn language this way are not known at present. Here we present a framework which begins to address this challenge. Our auto-catalytic, endogenous, reflective architecture (AERA) supports the creation of agents that can learn natural language by observation. We present results from two experiments where our S1 agent learns human communication by observing two humans interacting in a realtime mock television interview, using…