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Reid Simmons
Research Prof/Assoc Dir Educ/PhD Chair, RI/CS

Associated center: SRI

Email address: reids@cs.cmu.edu
Office: NSH 3205
Phone: (412) 268-2621
Fax: 412-268-7350

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

For more information, see my personal homepage.

Jump to: Research interests | Keywords | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications

My research interests focus on developing reliable, highly autonomous systems (especially mobile robots) that operate in rich, uncertain environments. The goal is to create intelligent systems that can operate autonomously for long periods of time in unstructured, natural environments. This necessitates robots that can plan, effectively reason about uncertainty, diagnose and recover from unanticipated errors, and reason about their limitations. In particular, I am interested in architectures for autonomy that combine deliberative and reactive behavior, reliable execution monitoring and error recovery, multi-robot coordination, probabilistic and symbolic planning, formal verification of autonomous systems, and human-robot social interaction.

• Architectures for Autonomy. We are developing the Task Description Language (TDL), an extension of C++ that includes syntax to support task-level control, such as task decomposition, task synchronization, monitoring and exception handling. TDL is based on our earlier work on the Task Control Architecture (TCA), a general-purpose architecture to support distributed planning, execution, error recovery, and task management for autonomous systems. TDL and TCA have been used in over a dozen mobile robot projects at CMU and elsewhere, including NASA and DARPA. At CMU, current testbeds include Xavier, Bullwinkle and Nomad. We are currently extending TDL to integrate within a three-tiered architecture and to handle coordination of multiple robot agents.

  We have also developed IPC a message-based package for inter-process communication. IPC features anonymous publish-subscribe messages, client-server messages, automatic serializing and deserializing of message data, including data containing pointers and variable-length arrays.

  Click here for a brief history of our research in architectures for task-level control.

• Execution Monitoring and Error Recovery. We are investigating methods for making mobile robots more robust and self-reliant. We are exploring the use of model-based reasoning techniques to detect and diagnose failures, hierarchies of monitors and exception handlers to catch unanticipated situations, and learning of new monitors and exception handlers from experience. The research incorporates symbolic (model-based) reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, interleaving of planning and execution and selective monitoring of relevant environmental features. Testbeds include Xavier and Amelia (office-delivery robots), Nomad (Antarctic exploration rover), and Bullwinkle (a testbed for Mars exploration).

• Multi-Robot Coordination. We are researching issues of how multiple, heterogeneous robots can coordinate to carry out high-level tasks, especially those that cannot be accomplished by a single robot. Issues include having the robots negotiate to dynamically form teams and assign tasks, monitoring each other's performance, and adapting dynamically to changing situations. Testbeds include the Mercator (urban exploration robots) and DIRA (multi-robot assembly and construction) projects.

• Probabilistic Planning and Reasoning. We are exploring advanced planning and reasoning techniques, many of which involve probabilistic reasoning. In particular, we are exploring issues of using information gain metrics to plan how to efficiently explore large areas (both indoors and outdoors), and using partially observable Markov models to navigate robots in office environments.

• Formal Verification of Autonomous Systems. We are developing tools and techniques to enable engineers to use formal methods more easily in the process of designing and implementing autonomous systems. The basic idea is to provide translators that can autonomously convert specialized representation used in autonomous systems into SMV, a formal model-checking language, verify the resulting models, and then translate any counter-examples back into the original representation language. The research also involves developing classes of properties that are useful to verify, automatic explanation and visualization of counter-examples, and advanced model-checking techniques that are relevant to verification of autonomous systems. To date, we have investigated these issues using the Livingstone model-based fault diagnosis system (developed at NASA Ames) and TDL, a language for specifying task-level control strategies for concurrent, distributed systems.

• Human-Robot Social Interaction. The goal here is to make robots more useful and acceptable by enabling them to interact with humans using social rules and conventions. This includes such rules as how to pass people in hallways in a socially acceptable manner, ride in elevators, and how to enter and wait in line. In conjunction with members of the Drama department, we are starting a project to give a robot a personality, and have it converse with people. The goal is to develop a robot that can escort visitors around Newell-Simon Hall and provide useful information naturally and pleasantly.

architectures, artificial intelligence, machine learning, mobile robots, motion planning, multi-agent systems, obstacle avoidance, planning, quality-of-life technology, and space robotics

• Human-Robot Interaction Group - We are interested in many aspects of human-robot interaction related to how humans and robots can work safely and effectively together.
• Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab - We are developing reliable, highly autonomous systems (especially mobile robots) that operate in rich, uncertain environments.

• Autonomous Mobile Assembly - The ACE project is concerned with autonomous mobile assembly.
• BeatBots - We are developing robots that can participate in coordinated rhythmic social interactions with people.
• Distributed Robot Architectures - The primary objective of this project is to develop fundamental capabilities that enable multiple, distributed, heterogeneous robots to coordinate tasks that cannot be accomplished by the robots individually.
• Formal Verification of Autonomous Systems - We are developing tools and techniques to support formal verification of autonomous systems.
• Grace - The Grace project is a collaboration among several schools and research labs to design a robot capable of fully performing the AAAI Grand Challenge.
• Inter-Process Communication Package - We are developing a high-level support package for connecting and sending data among processes using TCP / IP sockets.
• Life in the Atacama - Robotic field investigation will bring new scientific understanding of the Atacama as a habitat for life with distinct analogies to Mars.
• Mars Autonomy - Long-distance marsrover navigation with minimal human intervention.
• Quality of Life Technology Center - QoLT is a unique partnership between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that brings together a cross-disciplinary team of technologists, clinicians, industry partners, end users, and other stakeholders to create revolutionary technologies that will improve and sustain the quality of life for all people.
• Roboceptionist - In collaboration with the Drama Department, we are developing technology for long-term social interaction.
• Science Autonomy - The Science Autonomy project seeks to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of robotic planetary investigations by enabling automatic detection of relevant science features, classification of feature properties, and exploration planning that responds on-the-fly.
• Social Robots - We are developing robots with personality.
• Tartan Racing - Carnegie Mellon University is teaming with General Motors to compete in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.
• TRESTLE: Autonomous Assembly by Teams of Coordinated Robots - The TRESTLE project is developing the architectural framework necessary to coordinate robots performing complex assembly projects.
• Urban Challenge
• Xavier - Perceptual, reasoning and learning abilities in autonomous mobile robots

• Combining Cost and Reliability for Rough Terrain Navigation
  J. Kwak, M. Pivtoraiko, and R. Simmons
  9th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space (iSAIRAS'08), February, 2008. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [377 KB] copyrighted

• Human-Robot Teams for Large-Scale Assembly
  R. Simmons, S. Singh, F. Heger, L.M. Hiatt, S.C. Koterba, N. Melchior, and B.P. Sellner
  Proceedings of the NASA Science Technology Conference 2007 (NSTC-07), May, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [411 KB] copyrighted

• Particle RRT for Path Planning in Very Rough Terrain
  N. Melchior, J. Kwak, and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of the NASA Science Technology Conference 2007 (NSTC-07), May, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1019 KB], ps.gz [2299 KB] copyrighted

• Socially Distributed Perception: GRACE plays Social Tag at AAAI 2005
  M.P. Michalowski, S. Sabanovic, C.F. DiSalvo, D. Busquets Font, L.M. Hiatt, N. Melchior, and R. Simmons
  Autonomous Robots, Vol. 22, No. 4, May, 2007, pp. 385-397. [Abstract]

• Particle RRT for Path Planning with Uncertainty
  N. Melchior and R. Simmons
  2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, April, 2007, pp. 1617-1624. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [866 KB], ps.gz [2095 KB] copyrighted

• Natural Person-Following Behavior for Social Robots
  R. Gockley, J. Forlizzi, and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of Human-Robot Interaction, March, 2007, pp. 17-24. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [378 KB] copyrighted

• A Preliminary Study of Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Interaction
  T.W. Fong, J. Scholtz, J. Shah, L. Flueckiger, C. Kunz, D. Lees, J. Schreiner, M. Siegel, L. Hiatt, I. Nourbakhsh, R. Simmons, R. Ambrose, R. Burridge, B. Antonishek, M. Bugajska, A. Schultz, and J.G. Trafton
  International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, IEEE, October, 2006. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [737 KB] copyrighted

• Towards Proactive Replanning for Multi-Robot Teams
  B.P. Sellner and R. Simmons
  Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling in Space 2006, October, 2006. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [450 KB], ps.gz [566 KB] copyrighted

• Modeling Affect in Socially Interactive Robots
  R. Gockley, R. Simmons, and J. Forlizzi
  Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN06), September, 2006, pp. 558-563. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [289 KB] copyrighted

• Coordinated Multi-Agent Teams and Sliding Autonomy for Large-Scale Assembly
  B.P. Sellner, F. Heger, L. Hiatt, R. Simmons, and S. Singh
  Proceedings of the IEEE - Special Issue on Multi-Robot Systems, Vol. 94, No. 7, July, 2006, pp. 1425 - 1444. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1022 KB] copyrighted