科学英语：具有“认知”能力的水下机器人.docx

For the last decade, scientists have deployed1 increasingly capable underwater robots to map and monitor pockets of the ocean to track the health of fisheries, and survey marine2 habitats and species. In general, such robots are effective at carrying out low-level tasks, specifically assigned to them by human engineers -- a tedious and time-consuming process for the engineers. When deploying3 autonomous4 underwater vehicles (AUVs), much of an engineers time is spent writing scripts, or low-level commands, in order to direct a robot to carry out a mission plan. Now a new programming approach developed by MIT engineers gives robots more cognitive5 capabilities6, enabling humans to specify7 high-level goals, while a robot performs high-level decision-making to figure out how to achieve these goals.For example, an engineer may give a robot a list of goal locations to explore, along with any time constraints8, as well as physical directions, such as staying a certain distance above the seafloor. Using the system devised by the MIT team, the robot can then plan out a mission, choosing which locations to explore, in what order, within a given timeframe. If an unforeseen event prevents the robot from completing a task, it can choose to drop that task, or reconfigure the hardware to recover from a failure, on the fly.In March, the team tested the autonomous mission-planning system during a research cruise off the western coast of Australia. Over three weeks, the MIT engineers, along with groups from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Australian Center for Field Robotics, the University of Rhode Island, and elsewhere, tested several classes of AUVs, and their ability to work cooperatively to map the ocean environment.The MIT researchers tested their system on an autonomous underwater glider9, and demonstrated that the robot was able to operate safely among a number of other autonomous vehicles, while receiving higher-level commands. The glider, using the system, was ab