A computer research team consisting of several researchers will devise computer software capable of facilitating robotic automation in production.
Upon receiving a $10 M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers anticipate formulating intelligent software agents like smart programs that are capable of capturing instructions provided by human programmers, followed by enabling the rapid synthesis of codes. These codes are manuscripts and therefore may contain few errors.
This five-year initiative will be carried out in Penn. This effort, named ‘Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering’ (ExCAPE) is sponsored by the Expeditions in Computing program of NSF, to develop novel approaches and techniques in computing.
The ExCAPE research team comprises scientists from Rice computer Lydia Kavraki and Moshe Vardi; researchers from Cornell University, the University of California, Berkeley, MIT, the University of Maryland, UCLA, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Michigan. The team’s main objective is to construct ‘automated program-synthesis tools’ that will serve a wide range of applications. The research team at Rice will execute robotic application-challenges and will also demonstrate and determine the safety and efficiency of synthetic, computer-generated code.
ExCAPE team will demonstrate their research on programming for robotic behavior. Other challenges include formulating routing policy process for flow of information across networks of computers; updating the software which designed for single-processor computers to perform on multiple core-platforms most common for mobile devices; designing efficient and precise algorithms for synchronizing decisions between multiple computers.
According to Rice scientist Vardi, the newly developed tools should be capable enough to code the errors as well as identify the flawed logic responsible for the errors, thereby solving the coding challenges.