User:Jpereira

Meeting Summaries

October 8, 2010

Summary of meeting between Prof. Pedro Lima and José Nuno Pereira on October 8, 2010.

Topics:

• Bio-Inst Project:

Confirmed participation on further tasks of the Bio-Inst project, focusing on the tasks regarding institutional task and modeling.

• Formalization of Institutions (PN work):

Presented initial ideas about formalization of institutions as Petri Net Plans and some examples using the corridor case-study.

• Corridor Case-Study:

Real robots experiments on the corridor case-study were not performed. This was due to the inability of combining camera operations and infrared message exchange operations on the e-puck robot (both being too demanding on the dsPIC processor). This problem can now be bypassed with the use of the new infrared boards for the e-puck. These possess a separate processor dedicated to deal with all aspects of message exchange. This allows the e-puck original dsPIC to be able to handle the camera operations.

Being that a previous version of the case-study, where the camera was not used, was implemented, the following steps might lead to the implementation of the latest version of the experiment on real robots:

1. switch infrared message library so that message exchange is performed using the infrared board instead of the robots' proximity sensors;
2. implement wall-following mechanism using the camera (in order to keep a distance with neighboring robots);
3. basic camera functions (pixel color, image color) already implemented but need to be well calibrated, either on a static way (with constant light conditions every time the experiment is performed) or in dynamic way (running a calibration algorithm in the beginning of the experiment);
4. combine previous bullets into one single controller;
5. cross fingers and run the experiment.

November 18, 2010

Summary of meeting between Prof. Pedro Lima, Porfírio Silva and José Nuno Pereira on November 18, 2010. Focus mainly on the continued work on formalizing institutions using a Petri Nets framework.

• On the purpose of bringing PNs into Institutional Robotics (execution and/or modelling):

• On the choice between Petri Net Plans (Ziparo et al., 2010) or Costelha's multi-layer models methodology (Costelha and Lima, 2010):

• On how to (and how not to) model robot collectives using Institutional Robotics concepts: