>>6040543 "many security, surveillance, and reconnaissance tasks is that of monitoring (or observing) the movements of targets navigating in a bounded area of interest. A key research issue in these problems is that of sensor placement --- determining where sensors should be located to maintain the targets in view. In complex applications involving limited-range sensors, the use of multiple sensors dynamically moving over time is required. In this paper, we investigate the use of a cooperative team of autonomous sensor-based robots for the observation of multiple moving targets. We focus primarily on developing the distributed control strategies that allow the robot team to attempt to minimize the total time in which targets escape observation by some robot team member in the area of interest. This paper first formalizes the problem and discusses related work. We then present a distributed approximate approach to solving this problem that combines low-level multi-robot control with higher-level reasoning control based on the ALLIANCE formalism. We analyze the effectiveness of our approach by comparing it to three other feasible algorithms for cooperative control, showing the superiority of our approach for a large class of problems"
"The development of natural language interfaces to Artificial Intelligence systems is dependent on the representation of knowledge. A major impediment to building such systems has been the difficulty in adding sufficient linguistic and conceptual knowledge to extend and adapt thelr capabilities. This difficulty has been apparent in systems which perform the task of language production, i.e. the generation of natural language output to satisfy the communicative requirements of a system"