This paper discusses issues related to autonomy within BDIbased intelligent agent architectures and applications. One advantage that agent-based applications built upon formal theories such as BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) theories have over standard application implementation paradigms is their explicit implementation of some of the mentalistic states, such as goals, that are typically associa...

The author predicts that the interaction between individualand team-level autonomy influences team performance and that their combined effects are contingent on the level of task interdependence. Multiple regression analysis of data from 89 teams in a manufacturing setting confirm these expectations, demonstrating that team performance depends on the combination of individual and team autonomy....

Learner autonomy has been described as the ultimate objective in many language teaching programs since the third quarter of the twentieth century and educators have highlighted the significant role of promoting learner autonomy in the process of language learning and teaching. However, only limited number of studies has been awarded to what leaner autonomy mean to teachers. This study addressed...

Background: A disease impacts patients’ participation level in their individual and social life through impacting their physical and mental performance. Due to the increasing prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM), and the importance of patients’ participation and quality of life (QOL) and the determination of the most important aspects affected by the disease in the participation and...

Benevolent agents with a high level of autonomy can be designed to be aware of their social influences in order to make sure the overall missions are successful. Additionally, the system of social influences can be engineered to meet the designer’s objectives of predictable agent behavior. In this paper we outline a few agent architecture principles for such agents.

Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms have been commercially available for a decade. In order to operate these robotic arms, a user must have a high level of cognitive function. Our research focuses on replacing a manufacturer-provided, menu-based interface with a vision-based system while adding autonomy to reduce the cognitive load. Instead of manual task decomposition and execution, the user expli...

Wheelchair mounted robotic arms can assist people that have severe physical handicaps with activities of daily life. Manufacturer-provided direct input devices may not correlate well to the user’s motor skills and may require a high level of cognitive awareness. Our goal is to provide methods for independent manipulation of objects in unstructured environments utilizing a wheelchair mounted rob...

This paper presents methodologies to discretise nominal robots paths extracted from 3-D CAD drawings. Behind robot path discretization is the ability to have a robot adjusting the traversed paths so that the contact between robot tool and work-piece is properly maintained. In addition, a hybrid force/motion control system based on Fuzzy-PI control is proposed to adjust robot paths with external...