1. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ R2d2 project Università degli Studi di Pisa How to build a wheeled PC

2. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ The goal Realization of a platform for building interface agents embodied in a robot The robot provides a physical body and a set of core services to support the development of highly autonomous interface agents situated in both cyberspace and real world The platform will provide the following base services to support the software implementing the interface agent: –Basic motion abilities –Collision avoidance software –Vision software for face recognition –Speech and gesturing recognition –Positioning and navigation aided by video input –Network perception

3. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ The robot will be controlled by a network of CE and XP Hardware involved –Microprocessors: Xscale, P3 –UHF network –GSM –Ethernet –Bluetooth –Irda –WiFi R2 architecture Internal networkShort range service discovery Internet Connection

4. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Senses of a droID Services IRDA BT Internet “Real World”“Service World” AI KB Arm Sensors Vision Speech Navigation CE.NET XP Embedded

5. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Net is the force R2 relies on Internet to get information and provide a single interface to multiple services (search, question answering, messaging…) Internal network is used to distribute the computation needed to control the robot If needed other computers can be used to get higher computational power The computing structure will be GRID-like so that computation would be easily redistributable

6. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ User interface Voice Speech Messenger E-mail Phone (GSM, SMS) Whatever can be plugged!!! (but keyboard)

7. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Challenges The robot will be fairly standard (not challenging from an engineering standpoint) Base abstractions should be robust and provide a suitable API to support high level reasoning (like the ones provided by the RoboCup soccer-server) On top of the basic layer we will combine several approaches for planning and react to the environment The robot should accumulate experience and knowledge in order to provide an effective interface to the user: machine learning techniques

8. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Code reflection R2 will be able to percept services by analyzing.NET assemblies [a]C# is a C# extension, part of the CodeBricks initiative (http://codebricks.sscli.net/)http://codebricks.sscli.net/ [a]C# allows custom attributes on code blocks, and an API to retrieve the annotations and manipulate the bytecode at high level Instead of relying on interfaces we will interpret code annotations to discover semantics of services in terms of basic annotations

9. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Example [Gripper, DOF(5), IK] class Arm { void Grab(int x, int y, int z) { [Open]{} OpenDevice(); int speed = CalculateSpeed(); //… [Grab(x, y, z)] { [Move(x, y, z)] { // IK solver and move } [CloseGripper] { // Code for gripper } } // Other code here [Close]{} }

10. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Knowledge into code We are interested in representing part of the knowledge of the robot into code We believe that flattening data into code would lead into a scalable structure of KB (as LISP has ever done) Reflection.Emit is required but not sufficient: easier code manipulations approach will be used (for instance CodeBricks) Putting experience into the code itself implies that the program will evolve over time!

11. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Component structure Knowledge Base Body Map WiFi Agent MotionAgent Vision Agent Sensors Internal perception Network perception Arm Agent

12. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ People Project leader: Antonio Cisternino Team: –Diego Colombo –Andrea Esuli –Daniele Picciaia –Luca Pizziniaco

13. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Conclusions R2D2 will provide a platform to support research in embodied agents The robot isn’t specialized for any activity: is a proactive case for a PC The platform will allow to experiment new services and service discovery systems combining information of the real world with the Net Look for progress at http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/

14. 22/06/2003http://dotnet.di.unipi.it/R2D2/ Questions? WHY R2D2? For Fun! It is simple to build It is not specialized for particular activities