Research Summaries

Back Modeling Swarm Failsafe Behaviors with Monterey Phoenix

Fiscal Year 2015
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Consortium for Robotics & Unmanned Systems Education & Research
Investigator(s) Buettner, Jr., Raymond R.
Giammarco, Kristin M.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary The objective of this project is to expose and incorporate swarm failsafe behaviors into a design through the creation of models of unmanned/robotic agents interacting, as individuals or as a swarm, with each other and with humans providing command and control as well as other types of swarm-human interaction. This modeling effort will differ from any previous attempt to model swarm behavior in that it will apply a new behavior modeling framework known as Monterey Phoenix (MP), which provides for separation of the concerns of system behaviors and system interactions - concerns that are, in current practice, traditionally interwoven as hard-coded constraints on multi-actor activity models, or otherwise limited to stochastic simulations that address in comparison only a small subset of possible behaviors. MP restructures the very process by which system behaviors are modeled by chunking them into distinct, reusable agent (actor) models of possible agent behaviors, modeling agent interactions as separate constraints (in what is called an abstract interaction specification), and computing every possible permutation of agent behavior with every other possible agent behavior automatically from these models, to generate an exhaustive set of possible scenarios up to a specified scope limit. Setting a scope limit (e.g., a scope of 3 limits any behavior loop to three iterations) leverages the Small Scope Hypothesis (from Daniel Jackson at MIT), which states that most of the types of flaws present in a design can be exposed on small examples.
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Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal