Dr. Douglas C. MacKenzie, President

Dr. MacKenzie, President of Mobile Intelligence, received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1985 and the M.S. degree in Computer Science in 1989, both from Michigan Technological University. Dr. MacKenzie started work as a Software Engineer in Allen-Bradley's (a division of Rockwell) Programmable Controller Division in Cleveland, Ohio in 1988 while making the final changes to his Master's thesis titled "Broadcasting on Three Multiprocessor Interconnection Topologies". This research investigated various communication strategies for conducting message broadcasting when using large scale parallel computers connected in three common configurations. In 1990, Dr. MacKenzie returned to school, this time to the Georgia Institute of Technology, graduating with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in March, 1997.

While at Georgia Tech, Dr. MacKenzie initiated development of the MissionLab toolset and created the graphical Configuration Editor which brought visual programming to the behavior-based robotics domain. Dr. MacKenzie designed and conducted usability tests on MissionLab which demonstrated that, with only 30 minutes of training, even people unable to program in traditional languages were able to specify complex missions using the toolset. Dr. MacKenzie is particularly interested in empowering people who are not computer programmers to use advanced computer packages in ways that traditionally require programming skills. MissionLab has been shown to achieve this goal and continues to be actively used at Georgia Tech.

Since founding Mobile Intelligence, Dr. MacKenzie has been awarded over $2.5 million in DARPA research funding. These projects have advanced the state of the art in multi-agent robot architectures, case-based assisted robot mission planning, and distributed software agent architectures. Dr. MacKenzie continues to experiment with robotic platforms, the latest using jumping to extend the terrain reachable by wheeled vehicles. Dr. MacKenzie's recent interests have focused on distributed tasking of ad hoc teams of robots. His Collaborative Tasking protocol focuses on reliable de-centralized task assignment in the presence of constrained and lossy communications, and ensuring task completion in the presence of vehicle attrition.

Publications by Dr. MacKenzie:

1. Yoichiro Endo, Douglas C. MacKenzie, and Ronald C. Arkin. Usability Evaluation of High-Level User Assistance for Robot Mission Specification. To Appear, Special Issue on Human-Robot Interaction of theSMC Transactions: Part C, 2004.
2. D.C. MacKenzie. Collaborative Tasking of Tightly Constrained Multi-Robot Missions. In Multi-Robot Systems: From Swarms to Intelligent Automata (Proceedings Second International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems), Washington D.C., A.C. Schultz et al. Editors, Kluwer Academic Publishers. vol. 2, pp. 39-50, 2003.
3. Ronald C. Arkin, Yoichiro Endo, Brian Lee, Douglas C. MacKenzie, and Eric Martinson. Multistrategy Learning Methods for Multirobot Systems. In Multi-Robot Systems: From Swarms to Intelligent Automata (Proceedings Second International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems), Washington D.C., A.C. Schultz et al. Editors, Kluwer Academic Publishers. vol. 2, pp. 137-150, 2003.
4. D.C. MacKenzie and R.C. Arkin. Evaluating the usability of robot programming toolsets. The Intl. Journal of Robotics Research, 14(4):381~V401, April 1998.
5. D.C. MacKenzie, R.C. Arkin, and J.M. Cameron. Multiagent mission specification and execution. Autonomous Robots, 4(1):29~V52, 1997. Also appears in Robot Colonies, ed R. Arkin and G. Bekey, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.
6. D.C. MacKenzie. A Design Methodology for the Configuration of Behavior-Based Mobile Robots. Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing, 1997. GIT-CS-97/01.
7. D.C. MacKenzie and R.C. Arkin. Behavior-based mobile manipulation for drum sampling. In Proc. 1996 IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, volume 3, pages 2389~V2395, Minneapolis, MN., 1996.
8. D.C. MacKenzie and R.C. Arkin. Specification and execution of multiagent missions. In Proc. Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS 95), volume 3, pages 51~V58. IEEE/RSJ, IEEE Press, 1995.
9. T. Balch, G. Boone, T. Collins, H. Forbes, D. MacKenzie, J. Santamaria. Io, Ganymede and Callisto - A Multiagent Robot Trash-collecting Team. AI Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 39-51.
10. R.C. Arkin and D.C. MacKenzie. Planning to behave: A hybrid deliberative/reactive control architecture for mobile manipulation. In Proc. 1994 Intl. Symposium on Robotics and Manufacturing, pages 5~V12, Maui, HI., 1994.
11. R.C. Arkin and D.C. MacKenzie. Temporal Coordination of Perceptual Algorithms for Mobile Robot Navigation. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, volume 10, number 3, pp. 276-286, 1994.
12. D.C. MacKenzie and R.C. Arkin. Formal Specification for Behavior-based Mobile Robots . In Proc. SPIE Conference on Mobile Robots VIII, pp. 94-104, Boston, MA, 1993.
13. J. Cameron, D.C. MacKenzie, K. Ward, R.C. Arkin, and W. Book. Reactive Control for Mobile Manipulation. In Proc. 1993 Intl. Conference on Robotics and Automation, volume 3, pp. 228-235, 1993.
14. R.C. Arkin, W. Carter, and D.C. MacKenzie. Active Avoidance: Escape and Dodging Behaviors for Reactive Control. The Intl. Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, volume 7, number 1, pp. 175-192, February 1993.
15. Arkin, R.C., Balch, T., Collins, T., Henshaw, A., MacKenzie, D., Nitz, E., Rodriguez, R., and Ward, K. Buzz, An Instantiation of a schema-based reactive robotic system. In Proc. International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems: IAS-3, Pittsburg, PA., pp. 418-427, 1993.
16. D.C. MacKenzie and R.C. Arkin. Autonomous Helicopter Position Determination using an On-board Integrated Vision System. In SME/MVA Applied Machine Vision Conference '92, volume 1, pp 92-162, Atlanta, GA, 1992.
17. Baker, N.C., MacKenzie, D.C., and Ingalls, S.A., Development of an Autonomous Aerial Vehicle: A Case Study Journal of Applied Intelligence, Vol. 2, pp. 271-297, 1992.