Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Distributed Rational Agents

Open House 2002

Nine undergraduate participants of the REU summer program and three undergraduate students supported through NSF REU supplements participated in the REU Open House 2002 to present their research projects.

• ResiSim - Residential Home Simulator:

  Three REU students were involved in the development of a simulator for intelligent homes. The goal here is an interactive real-time simulation environment that realistically represents physical aspects of a home and allows for the testing of algorithms used in the control of the house. Furthermore, the simulator should allow for remote viewing of events at the users desired time rate. As events occur in the simulator or in the actual world, the same should happen in each counterpart. During the summer program, the REU participants investigated different simulation engines, rendering techniques, and interfaces to the hardware components. As a result they constructed a simulation using OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) and Blender3d. Major challenges addressed in this project were the development of novel techniques to simulate the large number of lights, the integration of the individual modeling and rendering components and the construction of interface modules to the sensor infrastructure and in particular to the X10 device server. The figure shows a view of the simulator.
  

• A Corba-Based Server for X10 Devices:

  The purpose of this project was to create a set of applications that will allow intelligent monitoring and control of a house's lights, motion sensors, appliances, etc. To make this applicable to average homes, X-10 devices using the X-10 power line protocol were chosen as the hardware components. One REU participant investigated the interface and processing issues involved in making these devices easily accessible to a general set of intelligent control components and to the residential simulator described above. As a result of the project, a hierarchical, distributed architecture consisting of room servers and a house server was developed and implemented. To permit easy and flexible access, all server components were wrapped in CORBA interfaces. The distributed implementation was chosen to reduce the amount of down time if one of the room servers crashes and to reduce the likelihood of a complete house wide failure of monitoring or control.

• Hardware and Software for Automated Miniblinds:

  Besides X10 devices, an additional device to be controlled was the mini-blinds. This project was performed by an REU participant together with a student supported on an REU supplement grant. The goal here was the development and implementation of hardware and software to permit for the intelligent control of the blinds from a computer. In the course of the summer program, prototype hardware as well as a CORBA-based interface were developed. The figure shows the prototype hardware.
  

• Mobile Agents:

  Two REU participants were involved in investigating mobile agents for distributed applications. The goal was to provide a virtual computer agent that would mobilize to other computers to perform a set task in the context of a calendar system that would allow a set of trusted users to set and synchronized events within the user group. To achieve this, the students studied a number of available technologies and developed a system consisting of mobile agents and a centralized server that provides agents with the ability to locate other agents in the network. In this framework, the mobile agents query the server for the appropriate computer locations and move to the respective computer to perform synchronization and event retrieval tasks at that site. All processing is performed by the mobile agents on the local computer rather than at a central location. The figure on the left shows a view of the user interface to the calendar application.
  

• Environment Mapping for Mobile Robots:

  Robotic agents are an important component of an intelligent home. To address the tasks required and to interact with humans, however, they have to be able to perceive their environment. To achieve this, an REU participant developed and implemented a probabilistic mapping system for a mobile robot based on prior work by a number of researchers including A. Elfes, S. Thrun, and D. Fox. As part of the project a sensor model for sonar sensors was developed and a mapping system was developed. The figure on the left shows the sensor model used and the results obtained while moving the robot along a hallway.
  

• Face Recognition:

  The goal of this project was to design a face recognition system that would work as a security system. With a camera placed above a door, the system would only admit authorized people into the home. Starting with a face recognition package from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an REU participant developed the system by adding components that permit the finding of the face in the image and by altering the face recognition code in order to make it interactive rather than batch-style. The resulting system permits to dynamically extend the face database and to perform individual queries on-line using a camera image. The figure on the left shows an example sequence in the face recognition process. From left to right this figure shows the initial image, the face localization and extraction, and the recognized face from the database.
  

• Voice Recognition:

• Media Server:

For additional information regarding this program please contact:

Manfred Huber
University of Texas at Arlington
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Box 19015
Arlington, TX 76019-0015
Email: reu@cse.uta.edu

* This project is funded by NSF grant EIA-0139564