James Taylor's Decision Management

This article on robots caught my eye today - Robots Clean Floors--and Save Lives, Panel Says - and combined with my work with Tommy on the DARPA Grand Challenge (see my post about Tommy winning an award) it made me think about the need to make decisioning technology part of the next generation of robots. So why is this?

• Robots are increasingly being used where people are used today. This means taking human judgment and expertise and embedding it in a robot so that it can behave autonomously at least at some level. This is a great use of business rules and is being worked on already by folks like Paul Perrone of Perrone Robotics. These rules include
• Route planning
• Obstacle detection
• Obstacle avoidance
• Route re-planning
• Pattern recognition is a key issue for robots and predictive analytic models, especially things like Neural Nets, are great tools for turning incoming data from lots of sources into something that can be identified as a pattern and thus an object to be manipulated or avoided.
• Robots must make large numbers of decisions in real-time to be effective. This is what decisioning technologies have been developed to do, albeit in an information handling rather than a real-world handling context.

There's some great discussion of the challenges of building an autonomous robot, and some video of Tommy, on the Sun site in the JavaOne Keynote Video- Paul and Tommy are on around 41minutes in. Tommy and Paul are also the subject of a forthcoming documentary - details at Robot World Media - and there is a presentation on the integration of business rules into a robotics platform here - Download file