Intelligent Software Agents

RoboCup Rescue US Open, Atlanta, Ga., May 7-10, 2005 --At the RoboCup Rescue US Open, the Carnegie Mellon University and The University Pittsburgh Team RAPTOR won 1st place in the Advanced Mobility class, 1st place in the Advanced Autonomy class and 3rd place in the RoboRescue League. RAPTOR was the only team to enter robots in every round of the competition. The RAPTOR team fielded three robots, a Pioneer, a PER and a Tarantula, that coordinated to search and find victims in 3 arenas of increasing difficulty. Congratulations to Mary Koes, Anton Chechetka, and Robin Glinton. The team is advised by Mike Lewis (U. of Pitt), Illah Nourbakhsh (CMU), Katia Sycara (CMU). The research, sponsored by an NSF ITR, aims at developing effective schemes for coordinating multi-agent teams of heterogeneous robots, software agents and people in disaster response.

Carnegie Mellon Receives $20 Million from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation To Build a New Home for the Study of Computer Science. When Gates made his first visit to Carnegie Mellon's campus last February, he said he believed "the most interesting problem of all in computer science--the one that's always been the most appealing and the toughest--is artificial intelligence. Carnegie Mellon...was a pioneer at looking at those problems and thinking about what progress could be made."

Simulated rubble field tests search and rescue robots, by Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Science Editor. Nourbakhsh and his CMU colleague Katia Sycara, along with Michael Weiss, an information technology scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, have received a $1.4 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to examine how robots, humans and intelligent agents can best work together.

Mobile Intelligent Agents, by John Geirland, in The Feature, Dec 11 2002. "Meanwhile, university and corporate research labs are quietly developing infrastructure for a new generation of wireless agents. The Intelligent Software Agents Group at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has developed a domain-independent toolkit for agent development called RETSINA (as in the Greek wine). Research professor Katia Sycara and her colleagues are building agents they hope will keep your car safely on the road and your social life securely on track."

Cyber-attack fears focus of national security forum, by Michael Yeomans, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, October 10, 2002. One technology displayed was a new software program from the CMU Robotics Institute designed to trip up cyber-terrorists who attempt to shut down computer networks through so-called "denial-of-service" attacks by changing Internet addresses on the fly when an attack is detected. "We move the victim out of harms way," said Joseph Giampapa of the Robotics Institute. "It's a cat-and-mouse game."

More RETSINA in the News

Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab

MAS Management

Information Gathering and Customization

Multi-Agent Learning