O'Grady, M.J., O'Hare, G.M.P., Navigation Support through Intelligent Agents, 8th ISU International Symposium &ndash Satellite Navigation Systems: Policy, Commercial and Technical Interaction, Strasbourg, France, May 2003. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Navigation Support through Intelligent Agents M. O'Grady, G. O'Hare, Practice and Research in Intelligent Systems & Media (PRISM) Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin (UCD), Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. e-mail:
[email protected];
[email protected] Abstract Mobile computing is likely to become the predominant computing paradigm in the coming years. In such a scenario, navigation support will become a service universally sought and expected by the broad mobile user community. An example of how intelligent agents may facilitate the delivery of such a service is briefly outlined.
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Introduction
During the last decade, a number of initiatives have been launched by academia and other interested groups aimed at making computing more accessible, usable and sensitive to users’ requirements. Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Computing, Context-aware Computing, Location-aware Computing and Ambient Computing are examples that have been well documented in the literature. All assume that the user’s position is either known or can be determined quickly. Outdoors, the use of GPS is assumed, given that it is freely available and can be utilised almost anywhere. Despite such advantages and its successful deployment in various domains, the utilisation of GPS have not yet reached its full potential. Applications that people can use in their every day lives are still practically non-existent and a crucial challenge for both researchers and commercial organisations is to remedy this deficiency. 2.
The Intelligent Agent
Intelligent agents offer a radical alternative to traditional software approaches. An agent is essentially a software entity that acts in an autonomous fashion, perceives and reacts to events within its environment and proactively seeks to achieve its objectives. In particular, agents can be modelled on what may be termed mentalistic concepts, for example, Beliefs, Desires and Intentions (BDI). In this case, the agent may form a number of beliefs (facts) through continuously perceiving its environment. Depending on its beliefs, it may be feasible to realise some of its desires (objectives) in which case it formulates the appropriate intentions. How these intentions are realised is specified by the software designer. All agents using a BDI architecture employ
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Satellite Navigation Systems: Policy, Commercial and Technical Interaction
a sophisticated reasoning mechanism based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. 3.
Introducing Gulliver’s Genie
As part of our research into mobile computing, we developed an electronic guide for tourists, which has been dubbed Gulliver’s Genie [1]. The system is hosted on a PDA, uses GPS for position determination and requires the availability of a GPRS network for data communications. The modus operandi of the guide is straightforward. As the tourist wanders a city, they have immediate access to their current position on an electronic map. On approaching a tourist attraction, a multimedia presentation is automatically displayed. In this way, the Genie seeks to address the two principal needs of tourists, namely navigation support and information about their immediate cultural environment. Underpinning the Genie is a suite of intelligent agents deployed both on the PDA and on the supporting servers. 4.
Delivering Navigation Support via Agents
An agent is assigned the task of monitoring the GPS sensor, verifying the integrity of the signal and extracting the tourist’s position and orientation. This information is then shared with any other interested agents. For example, the PDA display is continuously informed of position updates thus ensuring the position on the electronic map coincides with that of the tourist on the ground. By continuously observing the tourist’s movement, some deductions can be made about the tourist’s status. If the tourist has stopped for some time, the system may infer that they are lost and might welcome some advice. Alternatively, it can be safely anticipated that the tourist will request some location-aware service at some point and details of such services can be precached in advance on their PDA thus minimising the time delay inherent in all wireless data services. All these tasks are carried out in a transparent fashion. 5.
Future Work
It is hoped that by studying tourist movement over time, some heuristics can be identified for supporting their navigational requirements. Within our research, mobile intentional agents will be used as the primary enabler of location-aware services. References
O'Grady, M.J., O'Hare, G.M.P., Navigation Support through Intelligent Agents, 8th ISU International Symposium &ndash Satellite Navigation Systems: Policy, Commercial and Technical Interaction, Strasbourg, France, May 2003. Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1.
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O’Hare, G. and O’Grady, M.: Gulliver’s Genie: A Multi-Agent System for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Content Delivery, Computer Communications, Special issue on Ubiquitous Computing (forthcoming), 2003.
