Cooperative Intelligent Real-time Control Architecture

Edmund H. Durfee/Cooperative Intelligent Real-time Control Architecture

Principal Researchers

  • Edmund Durfee, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
  • Kang Shin, Real-time Computing Laboratory (RTCL)

Current Students

  • Haksun Li
  • Dmitri Dolgov

Proud Productions

CIRCA (the Cooperative Intelligent Real-time Control Architecture), shown in the adjoining figure, combines a traditional state-space AI planner with a real-time scheduler and plan execution module to build and schedule plans that execute in guaranteed (hard) real-time. First, to handle imprecise knowledge and incomplete plans, we incorporated a “safety net” that is able to detect and react to states that were not explicitly considered by the state-space planner. Next, we developed a negotiation strategy that allows stochastic planning and real-time resource allocation agents to iteratively make tradeoffs that ultimately minimize the likelihood of catastrophic system failure given a hard real-time environment and limited computational resources.

Publications:

Refereed Journal Articles

E. M. Atkins, T. F. Abdelzaher, K. G. Shin, and E. H. Durfee, Planning and Resource Allocation for Hard Real-time, Fault-Tolerant Plan Execution, to appear in Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems,, Mar-Apr 2001.

T. F. Abdelzaher, E. M. Atkins, and K. G. Shin, QoS Negotiation in Real-Time Systems and Its Application to Automated Flight Control, IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 49, no. 11, pp. 1170-1183, November 2000.

Conference Proceedings

J. Lennon and E. Atkins, “Color-based Vision Tracking for an Astronaut EVA Assist Vehicle,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Systems and Robotics in Space and Medicine, Houston, TX, September 2000.

E. M. Atkins, R. H. Miller, T. VanPelt, K. D. Shaw, W. B. Ribbens, P. D. Washabaugh, and D. S. Bernstein, Solus: An Autonomous Aircraft for Flight Control and Trajectory Planning Research, Proceedings of the American Control Conference (ACC), vol. 2, pp. 689-693, June 1998.

E. M. Atkins, T. F. Abdelzaher, K. G. Shin, and E. H. Durfee, Planning and Resource Allocation for Hard Real-time, Fault-Tolerant Plan Execution, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents ’99), May 1999.

E. M. Atkins, E. H. Durfee, K. G. Shin, Detecting and Reacting to Unplanned-for World States, Proceedings of AAAI-97, July 1997, pp. 571-576.

T. F. Abdelzaher, E. M. Atkins, and K. G. Shin, QoS Negotiation in Real-Time Systems and Its Application to Automated Flight Control, Proceedings of the Real-Time Technology and Application Symposium (RTAS-97), pp. 228-238, June 1997.

C. B. McVey, E. M. Atkins, E. H. Durfee, and K. G. Shin, Development of Iterative Real-time Scheduler to Planner Feedback, Proceedings of IJCAI-97, pp. 1267-1272, August 1997.

E. M. Atkins, E. H. Durfee, K. G. Shin, Plan Development Using Local Probabilistic Models, Proceedings of the Twelfth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 49-56, August 1996.

D. Cossey, N. Abhyankar, E. Atkins, R. Brillhart, D. Hunt, “Modal Survey of the ASTREX Test Article,” Proceedings of SPIE — the International Society for Optical Engineering, vol. 1923, part 2, pp. 1409-1412, 1993.

Symposium Proceedings and Workshop Working Notes

H. Li, E. M. Atkins, E. H. Durfee, and K. G. Shin, “Resource Allocation for a Limited Real-time Agent Using a Temporal Probabilistic World Model,” Working Notes of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Real-time Autonomous Systems, pp. 47-55, March 2000.

E. M. Atkins, “The Hybrid Planning-Scheduling System in CIRCA-II,” AAAI-2000 Workshop on Constraints and AI Planning, AAAI Technical Report WS-00-02, pp. 7-10, July 2000.

E. M. Atkins, “Knowledge Representation for Real-time Plan Development,” AAAI-2000 Workshop on Representational Issues for Real-World Planning Systems, AAAI Technical Report WS-00-07, pp. 1-5, July 2000.

E. M. Atkins, E. H. Durfee, and K. G. Shin, ,”Autonomous Flight with CIRCA-II,” Autonomous Agents-99 Workshop on Autonomy Control Software, May 1999.

E. M. Atkins, E. H. Durfee, K. G. Shin, Buying Time for Resource-Bounded Planning, AAAI-97 Workshop: Building Resource-Bounded Reasoning Systems Technical Report, pp. 7-11, July 1997.

E. M. Atkins, E. H. Durfee, K. G. Shin, Achieving Fully-Automated Aircraft Flight with Limited Resources, AAAI-96 Fall Symposium on Flexible Computation in Intelligent Systems: Results, Issues, and Opportunities Technical Report, pp. 177-179, November 1996.

E. M. Atkins, E. H. Durfee, K. G. Shin, Building a Plan with Real-Time Execution Guarantees, AAAI-96 Workshop on Structural Issues in Planning and Temporal Reasoning, pp. 1-6, August 1996.

Student Theses:

E. M. Atkins, Plan Generation and Hard Real-time Execution with Application to Safe, Autonomous Flight, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Michigan, 1999.

E. M. Atkins, Design and Implementation of a Multiprocessor System for Position and Attitude Control of an Underwater Robotic Vehicle, S.M. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990.