Building a Testbed for Studying Service
Wayne Iba, Nicholas Burwell · 2005
Performing a task for a user is one part of assistance. As a prior step, a helper must identify which of a possi-ble number of tasks should be assisted. We intend to study the requirements that enable service to be ren-dered and understand the factors that impact the deliv-ery of assistance. Toward this end, we extended a sim-ulated environment to use as our testbed for developing and evaluating approaches to service. Our new testbed, MÆDEN, supports multiple agents, communication be-tween agents, and records detailed logs of agents ' be-havior. We used the testbed in preliminary studies of servant and recipient behavior and interaction. Results hint at the usefulness of the testbed.