Sebastian Smith ○ Lance Hutchinson ○ Ben Damonte ○ Jennifer Knowles ○ Dr. Monica Nicolescu ○ Dr. Sergiu Dascalu Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno This project was developed in 2005/2006 as part of the course CS426/CPE426 Senior Projects Abstract The behavior-based robot control paradigm is a mature method for implementing intelligent robot controllers. This technique uses the interactions of simple behaviors to produce complex emergent behaviors - behaviors that are observed externally that were not explicitly programmed into the system. While highly flexible, behavior-based systems are often difficult to implement. Society was designed to ease the workload of developers by abstracting away the creation of behavior networks through application of the publish/subscribe communication paradigm. Conclusions Future Work Behavior Network and System Diagram Behavior Networks Behavior-based systems are a proven method of robot control that uses the interactions of simple behaviors to produce complex emergent behaviors that were not explicitly programmed into the system. The term “behavior” is abstract, and may be defined as any simple function of a robot. Complexity arises from simple behaviors when they are interconnected into a network. Since each behavior is a distinct computational unit, behavior-based systems lend themselves to distribution. The top diagram within the leftmost figure above depicts a traditional behavior network. Publish/Subscribe Publish/Subscribe is a communication paradigm in which subscribers register interest in an event and are notified as it is generated by a publisher. Since events serve as the communication medium between publishers and subscribers, neither requires knowledge of the underlying network topology. Rather, both communicate through an event notification system that routes packets between publishers and subscribers. Because of this loosely coupled nature the publish/subscribe communication paradigm is highly scalable, easily distributed, and high-performance. Society Society merges behavior-based control and the publish/subscribe communication paradigm. It utilizes a centralized server to route event data from producer behaviors to subscriber behaviors via the transmission control protocol. It provides an easy-to-use client application program interface that allows developers to rapidly develop complex behavior networks, and coordinate multi-agent robot teams. The leftmost figure above depicts the contrast between a traditional and Society-based behavior network. The rightmost figure above is a system diagram of Society. Behavior-based systems and the publish/subscribe communication paradigm are structurally complimentary. The distributed, loosely coupled nature of behavior-based systems closely models the publisher and subscriber roles of the publish/subscribe paradigm. While early in its development cycle, Society promises a robust feature set that will allow researchers to easily coordinate multi-agent robot teams, better utilize computing resources, and practice extensive code reuse. The high-performance nature of the publish/subscribe paradigm will also allow behavior networks to scale to currently unreachable degrees of complexity. Society will be developed as part of Sebastian Smith’s graduate work at the University of Nevada, Reno. As the project becomes stable it will be released free under the GNU Public License. Future features will include an advanced emergency response subsystem, dynamic distribution of behaviors via network interface, user datagram protocol support, stream control transmission protocol support, and an advanced diagnostics suite. The Society framework will also be used in multi-robot applications to demonstrate its advantages over existing coordination/communication approaches.