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The RoboCup 2D Simulation League incorporates several challenging features, setting a benchmark for Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this paper we describe some of the ideas and tools around the development of our team, Gliders2012. In our description, we focus on the evaluation function as one of our central mechanisms for action selection. We also point to a new framework for watching log files in a web browser that we release for use and further development by the RoboCup community. Finally, we also summarize results of the group and final matches we played during RoboCup 2012, with Gliders2012 finishing 4th out of 19 teams.
Game AI competitions are important to foster research and development on Game AI and AI in general. These competitions supply different challenging problems that can be translated into other contexts, virtual or real. They provide frameworks and tools to facilitate the research on their core topics and provide means for comparing and sharing results. A competition is also a way to motivate new researchers to study these challenges. In this document, we present the Geometry Friends Game AI Competition. Geometry Friends is a two-player cooperative physics-based puzzle platformer computer game. The concept of the game is simple, though its solving has proven to be difficult. While the main and apparent focus of the game is cooperation, it also relies on other AI-related problems such as planning, plan execution, and motion control, all connected to situational awareness. All of these must be solved in real-time. In this paper, we discuss the competition and the challenges it brings, and present an overview of the current solutions.
The MAPF problem is the fundamental problem of planning paths for multiple agents, where the key constraint is that the agents will be able to follow these paths concurrently without colliding with each other. Applications of MAPF include automated warehouses and autonomous vehicles. Research on MAPF has been flourishing in the past couple of years. Different MAPF research papers make different assumptions, e.g., whether agents can traverse the same road at the same time, and have different objective functions, e.g., minimize makespan or sum of agents actions costs. These assumptions and objectives are sometimes implicitly assumed or described informally. This makes it difficult to establish appropriate baselines for comparison in research papers, as well as making it difficult for practitioners to find the papers relevant to their concrete application. This paper aims to fill this gap and support researchers and practitioners by providing a unifying terminology for describing common MAPF assumptions and objectives. In addition, we also provide pointers to two MAPF benchmarks. In particular, we introduce a new grid-based benchmark for MAPF, and demonstrate experimentally that it poses a challenge to contemporary MAPF algorithms.
The traditional production paradigm of large batch production does not offer flexibility towards satisfying the requirements of individual customers. A new generation of smart factories is expected to support new multi-variety and small-batch customized production modes. For that, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is enabling higher value-added manufacturing by accelerating the integration of manufacturing and information communication technologies, including computing, communication, and control. The characteristics of a customized smart factory are to include self-perception, operations optimization, dynamic reconfiguration, and intelligent decision-making. The AI technologies will allow manufacturing systems to perceive the environment, adapt to the external needs, and extract the process knowledge, including business models, such as intelligent production, networked collaboration, and extended service models. This paper focuses on the implementation of AI in customized manufacturing (CM). The architecture of an AI-driven customized smart factory is presented. Details of intelligent manufacturing devices, intelligent information interaction, and construction of a flexible manufacturing line are showcased. The state-of-the-art AI technologies of potential use in CM, i.e., machine learning, multi-agent systems, Internet of Things, big data, and cloud-edge computing are surveyed. The AI-enabled technologies in a customized smart factory are validated with a case study of customized packaging. The experimental results have demonstrated that the AI-assisted CM offers the possibility of higher production flexibility and efficiency. Challenges and solutions related to AI in CM are also discussed.
Over the past decades, progress in deployable autonomous flight systems has slowly stagnated. This is reflected in todays production air-crafts, where pilots only enable simple physics-based systems such as autopilot for takeoff, landing, navigation, and terrain/traffic avoidance. Evidently, autonomy has not gained the trust of the community where higher problem complexity and cognitive workload are required. To address trust, we must revisit the process for developing autonomous capabilities: modeling and simulation. Given the prohibitive costs for live tests, we need to prototype and evaluate autonomous aerial agents in a high fidelity flight simulator with autonomous learning capabilities applicable to flight systems: such a open-source development platform is not available. As a result, we have developed GymFG: GymFG couples and extends a high fidelity, open-source flight simulator and a robust agent learning framework to facilitate learning of more complex tasks. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the use of GymFG to train an autonomous aerial agent using Imitation Learning. With GymFG, we can now deploy innovative ideas to address complex problems and build the trust necessary to move prototypes to the real-world.
Agents operating in unstructured environments often produce negative side effects (NSE), which are difficult to identify at design time. While the agent can learn to mitigate the side effects from human feedback, such feedback is often expensive and the rate of learning is sensitive to the agents state representation. We examine how humans can assist an agent, beyond providing feedback, and exploit their broader scope of knowledge to mitigate the impacts of NSE. We formulate this problem as a human-agent team with decoupled objectives. The agent optimizes its assigned task, during which its actions may produce NSE. The human shapes the environment through minor reconfiguration actions so as to mitigate the impacts of the agents side effects, without affecting the agents ability to complete its assigned task. We present an algorithm to solve this problem and analyze its theoretical properties. Through experiments with human subjects, we assess the willingness of users to perform minor environment modifications to mitigate the impacts of NSE. Empirical evaluation of our approach shows that the proposed framework can successfully mitigate NSE, without affecting the agents ability to complete its assigned task.