A Design Framework of Exploration, Segmentation, Navigation, and Instruction (ESNI) for the Lifecycle of Intelligent Mobile Agents as a Method for Mapping an Unknown Built Environment

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Sep 1;22(17):6615. doi: 10.3390/s22176615.

Abstract

Recent work on intelligent agents is a popular topic among the artificial intelligence community and robotic system design. The complexity of designing a framework as a guide for intelligent agents in an unknown built environment suggests a pressing need for the development of autonomous agents. However, most of the existing intelligent mobile agent design focus on the achievement of agent's specific practicality and ignore the systematic integration. Furthermore, there are only few studies focus on how the agent can utilize the information collected in unknown build environment to produce a learning pipeline for fundamental task prototype. The hierarchical framework is a combination of different individual modules that support a type of functionality by applying algorithms and each module is sequentially connected as a prerequisite for the next module. The proposed framework proved the effectiveness of ESNI system integration in the experiment section by evaluating the results in the testing environment. By a series of comparative simulations, the agent can quickly build the knowledge representation of the unknown environment, plan the actions accordingly, and perform some basic tasks sequentially. In addition, we discussed some common failures and limitations of the proposed framework.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; autonomous agent; hierarchical framework; path finding; robotic system design; unknown built environment.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Built Environment
  • Learning