Renewable energy resources, which are generally unstable, affect the performance of electricity grids when they are fully connected. A distributed energy supply network system is expected to compensate for the anticip...
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Renewable energy resources, which are generally unstable, affect the performance of electricity grids when they are fully connected. A distributed energy supply network system is expected to compensate for the anticipated performance problems. We have constructed a distributed autonomous system that controls batteries installed in each house. In this system, even if central control does not exist, electrical charging and discharging of the batteries are carried out for self-organization. As a result, the grid stability is maintained in the local urban district. Our system is based on the Turing pattern model. (c) 2013 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
In times of disaster, or other emergency situations, it is essential for people to be evacuated in a smooth manner. Evacuation must be performed promptly and safely. It is necessary to avoid generating a secondary dis...
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In times of disaster, or other emergency situations, it is essential for people to be evacuated in a smooth manner. Evacuation must be performed promptly and safely. It is necessary to avoid generating a secondary disaster at the time of evacuation. However, this is not easy to realize, because people often tend to panic when faced with disaster, crowding the evacuation passageways of buildings. On the other hand, people do not attempt to evacuate themselves from danger when the normalcy bias has occurred. Therefore, evacuation guidance is very important. However, it is impossible to guide all evacuees through authorities such as disaster countermeasure offices. To deal with this issue, the authors propose a system that provides optimal evacuation guidance autonomously without central server. The system works on the mobile devices of evacuees, performs distributed calculations using the framework of the distributed constraint optimization problem on ad-hoc communication, and does not need a central server. In the experiment using multi-agent simulation, for the case where the evacuees can receive evacuation guidance from this system, the evacuation completion time decreased. This paper presents an overview and the evaluation results of the prototype of the disaster evacuation assistance system.
A new prototype of a self-reconfigurable modular robot, M-TRAN III, has been developed, with an improved fast and rigid connection mechanism. Using a distributed controller, various control modes are possible: single-...
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A new prototype of a self-reconfigurable modular robot, M-TRAN III, has been developed, with an improved fast and rigid connection mechanism. Using a distributed controller, various control modes are possible: single-master, globally synchronous control or parallel asynchronous control. Self-reconfiguration experiments using up to 24 modules were undertaken by centralized or decentralized control. Experiments using decentralized control examined a modular structure moved in a given direction as a flow produced by local self-reconfigurations. In all experiments, system homogeneity and scalability were maintained: modules used identical software except for their ID numbers. Identical self-reconfiguration was realized when different modules were used in initial configurations.
A multi-agent system (MAS) is expected to be applied to various real-world problems where a single agent cannot accomplish given tasks. Due to the inherent complexity in the real-world MAS, however, manual design of g...
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A multi-agent system (MAS) is expected to be applied to various real-world problems where a single agent cannot accomplish given tasks. Due to the inherent complexity in the real-world MAS, however, manual design of group behaviors of agents is intractable. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which is a framework for multiple agents in the same environment to learn their policies adaptively by using reinforcement learning, would be a promising methodology for such complexity in the MAS. To acquire the group behaviors by MARL, all the agents are required to understand how to achieve the respective tasks cooperatively. So far, we have proposed "bottom-up MARL", which is a decentralized system to manage real and large-scale MARL, with a reward shaping algorithm to represent the group behaviors. The reward shaping algorithm, however, assumes that all the agents are in cooperative relationships to some extent. In this paper, therefore, we extend this algorithm to allow the agents not to know the interests between them. The interests are regarded as correlation coefficients derived from the agents' rewards, which are numerically estimated in an online manner. Actually, in both simulations and real experiments without knowledge of the interests between the agents, they correctly estimated their interests, thereby allowing them to derive their new rewards to represent the feasible group behaviors in the decentralized manner. As a result, our extended algorithm succeeded in acquiring the group behaviors from cooperative tasks to competitive tasks.
This paper reviews several types of self-repairing systems developed in the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. We have developed a modular system capable of "self-assembly" and "self-repair." The f...
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This paper reviews several types of self-repairing systems developed in the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. We have developed a modular system capable of "self-assembly" and "self-repair." The former means a set of units can form a given shape of the system without outside help;the latter means the system restores the original shape if an arbitrary part of the system is cut off. We show both two-dimensional and three-dimensional unit designs, and distributed algorithms for the units.
An assembly system based on holonic concept has been newly installed. The system consists of three manipulators, one belt-conveyor and two warehouses. The system assembles several parts into a product. Its sequences a...
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An assembly system based on holonic concept has been newly installed. The system consists of three manipulators, one belt-conveyor and two warehouses. The system assembles several parts into a product. Its sequences are planned by negotiation among the assembly devices by means of contract net protocol. Thus, even though the parts are supplied at different warehouses, the system can generate a sequence of transportation automatically. Utilizing the characteristics of distributed autonomous systems, a new concept Plug and Produce is proposed. A device can be installed easily and then immediately start to work. This system has high robustness against the reconfiguration and sudden changes of products. Experiments were made for two kinds of assembly tasks and verified the efficiency of the system. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
A three-dimensional (3D) self-reconfigurable system made of identical units is proposed. Each unit has six arms on the surface of its base cube which can connect to neighboring units mechanically. By the connection, a...
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A three-dimensional (3D) self-reconfigurable system made of identical units is proposed. Each unit has six arms on the surface of its base cube which can connect to neighboring units mechanically. By the connection, a cubic-lattice structure is formed. A unit can carry its neighbor unit from one node of the lattice to another by rotating its arm by 90 degrees. Repeating this movement, the structure can reconfigure itself to realize various 3D structures. The general process of reconfiguration was proposed for this system. A prototype system including six units was made and basic motions of self-reconfiguration were verified.
We propose an interpretable neural network architecture for multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to understand the rationale for learned cooperative behavior of the agents. Although the deep learning technology has...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9783030863807;9783030863791
We propose an interpretable neural network architecture for multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to understand the rationale for learned cooperative behavior of the agents. Although the deep learning technology has contributed significantly to multi-agent systems to build coordination among agents, it is still unclear what information the agents depend on to behave cooperatively. Removing this ambiguity may further improve the efficiency and productivity of multi-agent systems. The main idea of our proposal is to adopt the transformer to deep Q-network for addressing the above-mentioned issue. By extracting multi-head attention weights from the transformer encoder, we propose a multi-agent transformer deep Q-network (MAT-DQN) and show that agents using attention mechanisms possess better coordination capability with other agents despite being trained individually for a cooperative patrolling task problem;thus, they can exhibit better performance results compared with the agents with vanilla DQN (which is a baseline method). Furthermore, we indicate that it is possible to visualize heatmaps of attentions, which indicate the influential input-information in agents' decision-making process for their cooperative behaviors.
A concept of a self-repairable mechanical system which is composed of homogeneous mechanical units is described. We have developed a modular system capable of "self-assembly" and self-repair. The former mean...
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ISBN:
(纸本)0819434329
A concept of a self-repairable mechanical system which is composed of homogeneous mechanical units is described. We have developed a modular system capable of "self-assembly" and self-repair. The former means a set of units can form a given shape of the system without outside help, and the latter means the system restores the original shape if an arbitrary part of the system cut off. We show both of two-dimensional and three-dimensional unit design, and distributed algorithms for the units.
It has been pointed out that when people lack the information needed in the event of a disaster, such as a disastrous earthquake, this could lead to social chaos, including unwanted rumors and outrages, or could disru...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9783642216688;9783642216695
It has been pointed out that when people lack the information needed in the event of a disaster, such as a disastrous earthquake, this could lead to social chaos, including unwanted rumors and outrages, or could disrupt rescue and relief activities(1, 2). In Japan, by law in principle, self-help or mutual assistance is required immediately after a disaster, and local residents are required to make judgments for action on their own. Although disaster information systems are gradually being organized at the municipal level, actual emergency evacuation areas and essential information for local citizens are still not sufficiently ready for provision at this stage.(3) In this study, we established and evaluated a service infrastructure with an autonomous wireless network, aiming at providing services to collect and deliver disaster information, which will be required by local residents.
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