Model-based Self-Awareness for Autonomy |
Written by Ricardo Sanz | |||
Friday, 17 October 2008 | |||
An ASLab Research Seminar
Model-based Self-Awareness for AutonomyEngineering Functional Self-ManagementCarlos Hernández
Place: Aula Artigas, ETSII-UPM For systems to operate autonomously, their controllers have to cope with pervasive uncertainty: events in the dynamics of the plant that were unknown at design time. Classical control techniques work well when there are quantitative models of this uncertainty that can be used at design time. But we are now demanding control systems to operate with increasing qualitative uncertainty. Biological cognitive processes have provided useful inspiration to design controllers for that, although techniques are typically very dependent on the domain.
Efficiency and autonomy demand moving this responsibility to the control system itself, making it fully autonomous. We have turned again towards the biological for inspiration, to find that consciousness, or self-awareness, can be related to the management of the cognitive processes taking place in our minds (the controllers for our bodies). It involves introspection and second-order representations, associated to the modelling, not only of the external world, but of the mental processes as well. Self-awareness could then work as an operative system supporting the cognitive processes, orchestrating their operation to make it more efficient and adaptive. We propose an approach to engineer some of these capabilities by designing a control system that exploits a functional model of itself at runtime, so it can perform self-reconfiguration and hence cope with not pre-specified deviations from its objectives, independently of its origin (fault in the controller, unexpected in the environment...), as long as the necessary functions are available for implementation. Find more about Carlos Hernández.
|
|||
Last Updated ( Thursday, 13 October 2011 ) |