Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems - Volume 17, issue 4

Article Type: Other

Citation: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 333-333, 2006

Authors: Heintz, Fredrik | Doherty, Patrick

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Any autonomous system embedded in a dynamic and changing environment must be able to create qualitative knowledge and object structures representing aspects of its environment on the fly from raw or preprocessed sensor data in order to reason qualitatively about the environment and to supply such state information to other nodes in the distributed network in which it is embedded. These structures must be managed and made accessible to deliberative and reactive functionalities whose successful operation …is dependent on being situationally aware of the changes in both the robotic agent's embedding and internal environments. DyKnow is a knowledge processing middleware framework which provides a set of functionalities for contextually creating, storing, accessing and processing such structures. The framework is implemented and has been deployed as part of a deliberative/reactive architecture for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle. The architecture itself is distributed and uses real-time CORBA as a communications infrastructure. We describe the system and show how it can be used to create more abstract entity and state representations of the world which can then be used for situation awareness by an unmanned aerial vehicle in achieving mission goals. We also show that the framework is a working instantiation of many aspects of the JDL data fusion model. Show more

Citation: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 335-351, 2006

Authors: Drack, Lorenz | Zadeh, Hossein S.

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The implementation of Soft Computing methodologies in two aerospace design problems is presented, one being the design of quiet and efficient aircraft propellers, and the other being the manoeuvre control of a satellite. They were chosen as they present very challenging engineering design problems with nonlinearities and discontinuities in the design space. The methodologies used include Simulated Annealing for design optimisation, Neural Networks for system representation and Fuzzy Logic for system control. The choice of these …methods over conventional analytical techniques is shown to enable the solution of these design problems. The propeller design methodology described produces designs that have equivalent or improved performance and significantly reduced noise when compared to commercial off-the-shelf designs. The optimal satellite controller described shows significant improvements in reduced settling time and overshoot when compared to conventional controllers. Show more

Keywords: Optimisation, soft computing, neural networks, simulated annealing, propeller design, propeller noise, satellite control, fuzzy logic control

Citation: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 353-365, 2006

Authors: Hedelind, Mikael | Funk, Peter | Milic, Milun

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Production cells usually require a continuous supply of parts to be assembled. Elaborate feeding mechanisms or a system of prepared pallets on which the parts have exact positions are expensive and the feeding mechanism or pallets must be modified if a variation of the product is to be produced. Such solutions do not provide sufficient flexibility and increase production costs. Today's requirements for smaller series and customized orders have higher requirements on production cells. …In this paper we show how flexible and adaptive production can be achieved through methods and techniques from artificial intelligence by introducing an "autonomous" production cell that integrates and manages its own local buffer storage. The production cell is able to produce a number of variants of the product with no time delay between different configurations. The storage system, designated "Floating Storage", handles the local buffer storage and guides the industrial robots to use available floor-space as storage. The system also orders parts from the main storage as the buffer storage approaches depletion. The parts arrive to the cell in standard containers and a commercially available vision system is used to locate the material. The prototype has been introduced in an assembly line at ABB. Show more

Keywords: Automation, industrial robot, search algorithm, buffer storage

Citation: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 367-376, 2006

Authors: Johnsson, Magnus | Balkenius, Christian

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The LUCS Haptic Hand I together with a set of haptic models is the first in a series of projects aimed at studying haptic perception for building several robotic hands together with cognitive computational models of the corresponding human neurophysiology. The haptic systems have been trained and tested with a set of objects consisting of balls and cubes, and the activation in the modules corresponding to secondary somatosensory cortex is studied. The results suggest that the …haptic system is capable of categorizing objects according to size, if the shapes of the objects are restricted to spheres and cubes. Show more

Keywords: Haptic perception, artificial neural networks, robot hand, brain model

Citation: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 377-385, 2006

Authors: Lindgren, Helena | Eklund, Patrik

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: In order to provide support for differential diagnosis of dementia in medical practice, logical specification of a single clinical guideline is not sufficient. Therefore, a synthesis guideline has been formalized using core features from selected clinical guidelines which report high sensitivity, using conventional two-valued propositional logic. This guideline is sufficient for capturing the major part of typical cases of patients in the domain. However, in order to provide support in atypical cases, additional clinical guidelines …are needed in the reasoning process which report higher specificity but are pervaded with more uncertainty. In order to capture the different levels of significance in evidence expressed in the clinical guidelines an argumentation framework based on a many-valued propositional logic is adapted for the domain. This is accomplished in a context of transformations between logics. Formal frameworks will be given as well as a clinical case study where the sets of values that are attached to arguments correspond to the vocabulary used in the clinical guidelines, as well as the functions which compute the significance. Show more

Keywords: Dementia, diagnosis, qualitative reasoning, knowledge representation, protocols and guidelines

Citation: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 387-394, 2006

Authors: Pettersson, Per Olof | Doherty, Patrick

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for artificial intelligence. For both military and civil applications, there is a desire to develop more sophisticated UAV platforms where the emphasis is placed on development of intelligent capabilities. Imagine a mission scenario where a UAV is supplied with a 3D model of a region containing buildings and road structures and …is instructed to fly to an arbitrary number of building structures and collect video streams of each of the building's respective facades. In this article, we describe a fully operational UAV platform which can achieve such missions autonomously. We focus on the path planner integrated with the platform which can generate collision free paths autonomously during such missions. Both probabilistic roadmap-based (PRM) and rapidly exploring random trees-based (RRT) algorithms have been used with the platform. The PRM-based path planner has been tested together with the UAV platform in an urban environment used for UAV experimentation. Show more

Citation: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 395-405, 2006

Authors: Xiong, Ning | Funk, Peter

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Fundamental to case-based reasoning is the idea that similar problems have similar solutions. The meaning of the concept of "similarity" can vary in different situations and remains an issue. Since we want to identify and retrieve truly useful or relevant cases for problem solving, the metrics of similarity must be defined suitably to reflect the utility of cases for solving a particular target problem. A framework for utility-oriented similarity modeling is developed in this paper. The …main idea is to exploit a case library to obtain adequate samples of utility from pairs of cases. The task of similarity modeling then becomes the customization of the parameters in a similarity metric to minimize the discrepancy between the assessed similarity values and the utility scores desired. A new structure for similarity metrics is introduced which enables the encoding of single feature impacts and more competent approximation of case utility. Preliminary experimental results have shown that the proposed approach can be used for learning with a surprisingly small case base without the risk of over-fitting and that it yields stable system performance with variations in the threshold selected for case retrieval. Show more

Citation: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 407-416, 2006