We have developed a technique for place learning and place recognition in dynamic environments. Our technique associates evidence grids with places in the world and uses hill climbing to find the best alignment between current perceptions and learned evidence grids. We present results from five experiments performed using a real mobile robot in a real-world environment. These experiments measur...

The seminar centered around problems which arise in the context of machine learning in dynamic environments. Particular emphasis was put on a couple of specific questions in this context: how to represent and abstract knowledge appropriately to shape the problem of learning in a partially unknown and complex environment and how to combine statistical inference and abstract symbolic representati...

The Theory of Distributed Systems research group at MIT, led by Prof. Nancy Lynch, is working with the Cooperative Computing group at NTT on developing models and analysis methods for distributed systems, with a focus on cooperative group activities in networks. Such group activities range from human social activities in cyber communities to powerful distributed applications involving data shar...

A method of determining radiosity in an environment containing moving objects, is described. This method uses the hierarchical techniques of Hanrahan et al. to obtain a static solution. Hanrahan's techniques e ciently create a hierarchical meshing of the environments geometry, and create links from element to element based on the magnitude of the form-factor between the elements. These ideas ex...

Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources when the environmental state is uncertain, and we also test whether overt signals of other foragers’ success influences group matching behavior and group ada...

In this paper we present a navigation system for a mobile robot that is capable of operating in dynamic environments. Mapbuilding is based on landmark detection , with landmarks being established through a process of self-organisation of the robot's sensory data. The resultant map can then be used to determine, and subsequently follow, arbitrary paths through the environment. The results of sev...

Software reuse and hardware integration are key factors to offer flexible, low-cost smart environments. Until now, we have been using a static process called the SCD-process to allow a tool-supported realization of such smart environments. The SCD-process is comprised of three different phases: specification, configuration, and deployment. As an initially specified environment is expected to ch...

OBJECTIVE We present a snapshot of the work on situation awareness, which involves operators' comprehension of the dynamic situation that they are monitoring or controlling. BACKGROUND Although human factors has always been concerned with helping the operator in his or her work environment, research exploded in the mid-1990s on one relevant construct, situation awareness. METHOD We discuss ...

Solving problems in dynamic and heterogeneous environments where information sources change its format representation and the data stored along the time is a very complex problem. In previous work we have presented a system called MAPWeb (MultiAgent Planning in the Web) that tries to solve those problems by integrating artificial intelligence planning techniques within the MultiAgent framework....

Catalytic Search is an optimization algorithm inspired by random catalytic reaction networks and their pre-evolutionary dynamics. It runs within an Artificial Chemistry in which reactions can be reversible, and replication is not taken for granted. In previous work one of us had shown that although inherently slower than Evolutionary Algorithms, Catalytic Search is able to solve simple problems...