Bruce is one of the UVA Vision Group's robots. He was built for a software engineering class, but has now been elevated to the more glorious position of research tool. Currently, we are using Bruce for experiments combining reactive navigation and map usage.

Bruce is a RugWarrior based robot who has grown a lot in the past few months. Most of his components were custom built by Bob Ross from the SIL and Bob Bryant from the Biomedical Engineering Machine Shop.

Bruce is the mobile platform on which we are building our autonomous agent architecture. We are concentrating on the integration of a planner and a perception/action system through a simple interface which represents task dependant objects in the agent's environment.

Work By Frank Brill has shown that markers can be used effectively by perception/action (PA) systems to achieve greater competance in a variety of tasks (see his dissertation abstract). The current work is on extending these memory structures to allow the integration of planning and action.

In our architecture, the interface between the planner and the PA system is called the "task executor". This layer takes plans from the planner and sequences them to the PA system as appropriate. By placing representations into the PA systems local-space memory, the task executor (TE) can efficiently and effectively control the actions of the PA system.

You can read more about our architecture, our memory structure and one of our favorite example tasks (hide and seek) in our publications section.

Bruce's special hardware includes:

• bump skirt capable of detecting impact from 3 sides
• one of the cheapest miniature pan/tilt units ($600) controlled by a seperate HC11
• a single color miniature camera, broadcasting video via a SuperCircuits ATV transmitter
• 9600 baud radio modem from ComRad
• improved shaft encoders from U.S. Digital

Bruce is undergoing further modifications all the time. In the future we hope to add:

• some actuator
• sonar

For more information on Bruce, please see Glenn Wasson's research pages:

• Glenn's Bruce Pages
• Movies of Bruce