Execution control is a critical task of robot architectures which has a deep impact on the quality of the final system. In this study, we describe a general method for execution control, which is a part of the Aerostack software framework for aerial robotics, and present technical challenges for execution control and design decisions to develop the method. The proposed method has an original design combining a distributed approach for execution control of behaviors (such as situation checking and performance monitoring) and centralizes coordination to ensure consistency of the concurrent execution. We conduct experiments to evaluate the method. The experimental results show that the method is general and usable with acceptable development efforts to efficiently work on different types of aerial missions. The method is supported by standards based on a robot operating system (ROS) contributing to its general use, and an open-source project is integrated in the Aerostack framework. Therefore, its technical details are fully accessible to developers and freely available to be used in the development of new aerial robotic systems.

Modern sensor technologies and simulators applied to large and complex dynamic systems (such as road traffic networks, sets of river channels, etc.) produce large amounts of behavior data that are difficult for users to interpret and analyze. Software tools that generate presentations combining text and graphics can help users understand this data. In this paper we describe the results of our research on automatic multimedia presentation generation (including text, graphics, maps, images, etc.) for interactive exploration of behavior datasets. We designed a novel user interface that combines automatically generated text and graphical resources. We describe the general knowledge-based design of our presentation generation tool. We also present applications that we developed to validate the method, and a comparison with related work.

Effective data summarization methods that use AI techniques can help humans understand large sets of data. In this paper, we describe a knowledge-based method for automatically generating summaries of geospatial and temporal data, i.e. data with geographical and temporal references. The method is useful for summarizing data streams, such as GPS traces and traffic information, that are becoming more prevalent with the increasing use of sensors in computing devices. The method presented here is an initial architecture for our ongoing research in this domain. In this paper we describe the data representations we have designed for our method, our implementations of components to perform data abstraction and natural language generation. We also discuss evaluation results that show the ability of our method to generate certain types of geospatial and temporal descriptions.

The maintenance of knowledge bases is one of the crucial activities in the life cycle of knowledge systems. This paper describes an innovative approach to write complex and large knowledge bases using specialized word processors. According to this, a knowledge model is represented as a conventional document that is written following the standard operations of word processors. Following this approach, domain experts that are not familiar with computer languages could easier read and write complex knowledge models. In addition to that, the processor is able of interpreting the content of the document to automatically perform tasks of the knowledge model. The paper describes the basic characteristics of the document and its specialized word processor and presents our experience following this approach for a knowledge system in the domain of hydrology.

Presentation models are used by intelligent user interfaces to automatically construct adapted presentations according to particular communication goals. This paper describes the characteristics of a presentation model that was designed to automatically produce multimedia presentations about the summarized behavior of dynamic systems. The presentation model is part of the MSB application (Multimedia Summarizer of Behavior). MSB was developed for the problem of management of dynamic systems where different types of users (operators, decision-makers, other institutions, etc.) need to be informed about the evolution of the system, especially during critical situations. The paper describes the details of the presentation model based on a hierarchical planner together with graphical resources. The paper also describes an application in the field of hydrology for which the model was developed.

In computer science, different types of reusable components for building software applications were proposed as a direct consequence of the emergence of new software programming paradigms. The success of these components for building applications depends on factors such as the flexibility in their combination or the facility for their selection in centralised or distributed environments such as internet. In this article, we propose a general type of reusable component, called primitive of representation, inspired by a knowledge-based approach that can promote reusability. The proposal can be understood as a generalisation of existing partial solutions that is applicable to both software and knowledge engineering for the development of hybrid applications that integrate conventional and knowledge based techniques. The article presents the structure and use of the component and describes our recent experience in the development of real-world applications based on this approach.