Tom Williams, Collin Johnson, Matthias Scheutz and Benjamin Kuipers.
A tale of two architectures: A dual-citizenship integration of natural language and the cognitive map.
Int. Conf. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), 2017.
Vulcan and DIARC are two robot architectures with very different capabilities: Vulcan uses rich spatial representations to facilitate navigation capabilities in real-world, campus-like environments, while DIARC uses high-level cognitive representations to facilitate human-like tasking through natural language. In this work, we show how the integration of Vulcan and DIARC enables not only the capabilities of the two individual architectures, but new synergistic capabilities as well, as each architecture leverages the strengths of the other. This integration presents interesting challenges, as DIARC and Vulcan are implemented in distinct multi-agent system middlewares.
Accordingly, a second major contribution of this paper is the Vulcan-ADE Development Environment (VADE): a novel multi-agent system framework comprised of both (1) software agents belonging to a single robot architecture and implemented in a single multi-agent system middleware, and (2) "Dual-Citizen" agents that belong to both robot architectures and that use elements of both multi-agent system middlewares. As one example application, we demonstrate the implementation of the new joint architecture and novel multi-agent system framework on a robotic wheelchair, and show how this integration advances the state-of-the-art for NL-enabled wheelchairs.