Hello everyone,
I have been a member of this list for a while now. I'm Harry Behrens
and am currently working for my PhD at the University of Tokyo.
My field of research is somehow connected to this mailing list's
theme (it's 'design of distributed knowledgebases'), but I've mainly been
"lurking" here so far :-)
Anyway, because I currently have to investigate some of the issues raised
in the thread "Inter-robot communication", I'd like to comment the following
mail:
"John D. Pritchard" said:> > Does anyone know if there is a formal specification, or protocol, for
"John D. Pritchard" said:> > inter-robot communication?
"John D. Pritchard" said:>
"John D. Pritchard" said:> use SGML
"John D. Pritchard" said:>
I believe that robots are 'active' objects as opposed to 'static' HTML
pages. If the trend should go to static document description methods
(like SGML), some discrepany of paradigm and as a result, loss of
functional efficiency would surely result.
I therefore would like to suggest approaches like the DCE, - or the NEO for
those that prefer a higher level of abstraction.
Using these well-documented development environment, I believe it could be
possible to create a network of communicating robots.
(For those that might think I am connected to SUN: Any development
environment, that allows for design of distributed applications
is OK; it's just that the two environments mentioned - DCE and NEO -
are the only major ones, that I had a chance to work with.
Such interacting robots could eventually grow into an infrastructure that
would be the base for all major information retrieval services that use
the Internet. With tools like Java, VRML and others, these robots
could eventually serve not only 'grep'ed text indices, but applications
or animations in response to queries.
I call it World Wide Computing (WWC): the logical next step in the development
of the Internet.
"John D. Pritchard" said:> > If there are currently no formal specifications for a robot communication
"John D. Pritchard" said:> > protocol, I'd be very interested in talking to people who are wishing to
"John D. Pritchard" said:> > formulate an open standard.
"John D. Pritchard" said:>
"John D. Pritchard" said:> some small DTDs should be developed to get things rolling.
"John D. Pritchard" said:>
As said before, I don't believe DTDs would be the right way to go. I'd
be interested to hear from those, that have tried to use DCE or NEO to
create communicating WWW services.
I hope, that some of the things I have said, is useful.
If not, I apologize for wasting precious bandwidth :-;
Harry "Munir Basha" Behrens Tel.: +81-3-3812-2111 #6752
PhD candidate +81-3-3814-4251 #6763
Tanaka Lab
Dept. of Electrical Engineering e-mail: behrens@mtl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp
University of Tokyo
The Robustness Principle (RFC 1123):
"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"