Nina B. Zumel Email: zumel@ai.sri.com SRI International 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, CA 94025
We are developing techniques for balancing multiple goals and constraints within a reactive, behavior-based architecture. The basic idea: for each goal or constraint, rather than generating an optimal action, we define a utility function over the entire space of feasible actions. These utility functions are combined in an appropriate way, to select an action which is as good as possible for the multiplicity of considerations which the agent must pay attention to. We are focusing on issues of multiagent coordination, especially the balance between information needs and communication limitations.
Design Rationale, in our broad interpretation, is any information about a design -- in this project, mechanical design -- that enhances understanding of that design by other designers. In other words, we wish to record not only what the original designers did, but why. We focus on rationale which is potentially useful for later stages in the life of the artifact: information useful for maintenance, for redesign, or for design reuse. The Rationale Construction Framework is a system which monitors a design engineer interacting with a commercial CAD tool, and constructs a detailed design history, as well as attempting to give likely explanations for various critical design decisions made by the designer along the way.
Thesis Work: While nonprehensile, sensorless parts orienting devices, such as bowl feeders or the SONY Automatic Parts Orienting System (APOS), are commonly used in automatic assembly environments, they must be custom designed for each specific task. My thesis work focused on developing a motion planning algorithm for a generic device used for orienting parts in the plane. The part-orienting plans produced by the algorithm are robust to uncertainties in the part's initial state and in the coefficient of friction, as well as to small inaccuracies in manipulator calibration.
K.L. Myers, N.B. Zumel, and P. Garcia, "Automated Capture of Rationale for the Detailed Design Process"; presented at the Eleventh Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 1999.
K.L. Myers, N.B. Zumel, and P. Garcia, "Acquiring Design Rationale Automatically"; A longer version of the IAAI paper, accepted to appear in the Journal Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing.
N. B. Zumel. A Nonprehensile Method for Reliable Parts Orienting. Ph.D. thesis, 1997.
N. B. Zumel and M. A. Erdmann. Nonprehensile Manipulation for Orienting Parts in the Plane. 1997 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
N. B. Zumel and M. A. Erdmann. Nonprehensile Two Palm Manipulation with Non-Equilibrium Transitions between Stable States. 1996 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, v. 4, pp. 3317-3323.
N. B. Zumel and M. A. Erdmann. Balancing of a Planar Bouncing Object. 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, v. 4, pp. 2949-2954.
E. Krotkov, R. Klatzky, and N. Zumel. Robotic Perception of Material: Experiments with Shape-Invariant Acoustic Measures of Material Type. In Experimental Robotics IV, O. Khatib and K. Salibury, editors. Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, 200. Springer-Verlag, 1996. Proceedings of Conference, June-July 1995.