Progress of C-MAP: A Context-Aware Mobile Assistant

Intelligent Environments

Volume

Papers from the 1998 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

An interface agent with a life-like character on a personal mobile computer based guidance system is a plausible interface design approach for supporting and mediating communication between exhibitors and visitors of museums, laboratory tours and trade-shows. The guide agents should acquire their information ubiquitously and integrate this knowledge to provide context relevant assistant to visitors. C-MAP is a context-aware mobile assistant system that provides a mobile guide agent for assisting visitors during exhibitions. The system uses 30 portable computers, two servers, and an active badge location server. The portable computers are networked using a 1Mbit/sec wireless FM connection to the ethernet which the servers are connected to. Currently, the guide agent has a life-like animated character with four different behaviour s, a physical map and a semantic map. The physical map tracks the visitor’s location relative to the exhibits while the semantic map tracks the visitor’s interests relative to the exhibitions. The guide agent uses the visitor’s interest to plan a tour through the exhibition. A layered infrastructure is used to coordinate the guide agents and distribute their computation. This paper presents progress made towards the implementation of C-MAP.