The Shelley Integrated Environment (SIE) is the result of Andy Ritger's senior Research Honors project into designing an environment where artificial entities can be more easily designed and implemented without having to directly deal with the complexities of accessing Shelley's external hardware devices (such as robot arms, vision cameras, etc). The approach uses the model of a modern operating system (processes - kernel - peripherals) to arrive at the SIE model (agents - administrator - devices), where agents are the artificially intelligent entities programmed to accomplish a specific task, the devices are essentially software drivers which interface to Shelley's specialized hardware, and the administrator serves as a mediator between agents and devices, controlling how agents access and share the devices.
The following is the Conclusion of Andy Ritger's Research Honors paper describing SIE:| The Shelley Integrated Environment (SIE) is designed primarily with the goal of easing implementation of future projects by providing an easy means for accessing the devices which allow Shelley to interact with her surroundings. The design emphasizes flexibility and expandability, as well as simple code reuse in the form of separate modules. The agent/administrator/device model upon which SIE is built allows the implementors of agents to not be concerned with the inner workings of accessing specialized hardware -- this is localized to specific device modules. Inter-module communication is accomplished using the sockets API, which offers the future opportunity to distribute SIE over a network of computers. Multiple agents can be run in conjunction, building an integrated system of behaviors. It is the administrator's responsibility to regulate and manage agent access to devices, much like in the modern operating system, it is the kernel's responsibility to regulate and manage processes and their access to system resources. Finally, the specifics of how Shelley maps sensory input to behavioral output is encapsulated in the agents, thus SIE serves only to facilitate and does not confine how future researchers approach the problem of building an artificially intelligent entity. |
Michael Zalokar advanced SIE
development for his research honors project by continuing work started
three years ealier. The goal is to play tic-tac-toe interactively with
people. This time a digital camera was used to see the tic-tac-toe game
board.
Progress journal of the vision
system.
Presentation page of the
vision system.