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Situational Awareness Planner Implementing Effective Navigation in Traffic (SAPIENT)
This project is no longer active.

Head: Rahul Sukthankar
Contact: Rahul Sukthankar (rahuls@cs.cmu.edu)

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

Associated center: VASC
Associated lab/group: NavLab

For more information, see this project's homepage.

Project Description

A primary challenge to creating an intelligent vehicle that can competently drive in traffic is the task of tactical reasoning: deciding which maneuvers to perform in a particular driving situation, in real-time, given incomplete information about the rapidly changing traffic configuration. Human expertise in tactical driving is attributed to situation awareness, a task-specific understanding of the dynamic entities in the environment, and their projected impact on the agent's actions.

SAPIENT is a distributed intelligence built around the notion of reasoning objects, independent experts, each specializing in a single aspect of the driving domain. Each reasoning object is associated with an observed traffic entity, such as a nearby vehicle or an upcoming exit, and examines the projected interactions of that entity on the agent's proposed actions. Thus, a reasoning object associated with a vehicle is responsible for preventing collisions, while one associated with a desired exit recommends those actions that will help maneuver the vehicle to the exit. The results are expressed as votes and vetos over a tactical action space of available maneuvers, and are used by a domain-independent arbiter to select the agent's next action. This loose coupling avoids the complex interactions common in traditional architectures, and also allows new reasoning objects to be easily added to an existing SAPIENT system.

Past members

	Name	Title	Email Address
	Rahul Sukthankar	Adjunct Faculty (Adjunct)	rahuls@cs.cmu.edu

Past Sub-projects

Tessellator - Space Shuttle Tile Inspector

Publications

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Evolving an Intelligent Vehicle for Tactical Reasoning in Traffic
  R. Sukthankar, S. Baluja, and J. Hancock
  Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 1, April, 1997, pp. 519 - 524. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [182 KB], ps.gz [226 KB] copyrighted

• Situation Awareness for Tactical Driving
  R. Sukthankar
  doctoral dissertation, tech. report CMU-RI-TR-97-08, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, January, 1997. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [917 KB], ps.gz [822 KB] copyrighted

• Adaptive Intelligent Vehicle Modules for Tactical Driving
  R. Sukthankar, J. Hancock, S. Baluja, D. Pomerleau, and C. Thorpe
  Proceedings AAAI '96, 1996. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [125 KB], ps.gz [107 KB] copyrighted

• Prototyping Intelligent Vehicle Modules Using Evolutionary Algorithms
  S. Baluja, R. Sukthankar, and J. Hancock
  Evolutionary Algorithms in Engineering Applications, Dasgupta, D. and Michalewicz, Z., ed., Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1996, pp. 241 - 257. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [341 KB] copyrighted