Online Paper: Franklin-Thesis01
The Intelligent Classroom: Providing Competent Assistance
David Franklin (Advised by Kristian Hammond)
How can we make robotic systems that physically interact and
cooperate with people in interesting ways? Such systems will be
useful to people because they understand the tasks they are to be
used for and can figure out to help out in them. I refer to such
systems (both robotic and purely electronic) as competent assistants:
systems that are able to aid a user in his work because they
understand what that work is.
This dissertation describes a competent assistant that advances the
state of the art for physical interaction: the Intelligent Classroom,
a prototype automated lecture facility that serves as its own
audio/visual assistant. The Classroom domain provides an interesting
level of interaction and also exhibits many of the interesting
challenges of mobile autonomous robotics research. Key contributions
of this research include:
- Techniques for connecting the low-level sensors and actuators to a
plan-recognizing symbolic execution system.
- Demonstrating how a good level of intentional cooperative interaction
can be achieved without explicitly reasoning about goals.
- A voice-operated slide-advancing system. Jabberwocky uses
speech-recognition results to determine what slide a speaker wishes to
discuss, allowing a speaker to dynamically change his presentation to suit
the needs of his audience.
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[postscript]