In recent years, autonomous robots, including Xavier, Martha [1], Rhino [2,3], Minerva,and Remote Agent, have shown impressive performance in long-term demonstrations. In NASA’s Deep Space program, for example, an - tonomous spacecraft controller, called the Remote Agent [5], has autonomously performed a scienti?c experiment in space. At Carnegie Mellon University, Xavier [6], another autonomous mobile robot, navigated through an o?ce - vironment for more than a year, allowing people to issue navigation commands and monitor their execution via the Internet. In 1998, Minerva [7] acted for 13 days as a museum tourguide in the Smithsonian Museum, and led several thousand people through an exhibition. These autonomous robots have in common that they rely on plan-based c- trol in order to achieve better problem-solving competence. In the plan-based approach, robots generate control actions by maintaining and executing a plan that is e?ective and has a high expected utility with respect to the robots’ c- rent goals and beliefs. Plans are robot control programs that a robot can not only execute but also reason about and manipulate [4]. Thus, a plan-based c- troller is able to manage and adapt the robot’s intended course of action — the plan — while executing it and can thereby better achieve complex and changing tasks.

Robotic agents, such as autonomous office couriers or robot tourguides, must be both reliable and efficient. Thus, they have to flexibly interleave their tasks, exploit opportunities, quickly plan their course of action, and, if necessary, revise their intended activities. This book makes three major contributions to improving the capabilities of robotic agents: - first, a plan representation method is introduced which allows for specifying flexible and reliable behavior - second, probabilistic hybrid action models are presented as a realistic causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern concurrent percept-driven robot plans - third, the system XFRMLEARN capable of learning structured symbolic navigation plans is described in detail.

Since the mid 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into a very active area of research and also commercial development activity. One of the limiting factors in industry take-up of agent-technology, however, is the lack of adequate software engineering support. The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Workshop, AOSE, focuses on the synergies and cross fertilization between software engineering and agent research. This volume presents both thoroughly revised selected papers from the AOSE 2010 workshop held at AAMAS 2010 in Toronto, Canada in May 2010 as well as invited articles by leading researchers in the field. The papers cover a broad range of topics related to software engineering and agent-based systems, with particular attention to the integration of concepts and techniques from multi-agent systems with conventional engineering approaches on the one hand, and to the integration of agent-oriented software engineering and methodologies with conventional engineering processes on the other hand.

Based on the successful Modelling and Control of Robot Manipulators by Sciavicco and Siciliano (Springer, 2000), Robotics provides the basic know-how on the foundations of robotics: modelling, planning and control. It has been expanded to include coverage of mobile robots, visual control and motion planning. A variety of problems is raised throughout, and the proper tools to find engineering-oriented solutions are introduced and explained. The text includes coverage of fundamental topics like kinematics, and trajectory planning and related technological aspects including actuators and sensors. To impart practical skill, examples and case studies are carefully worked out and interwoven through the text, with frequent resort to simulation. In addition, end-of-chapter exercises are proposed, and the book is accompanied by an electronic solutions manual containing the MATLAB® code for computer problems; this is available free of charge to those adopting this volume as a textbook for courses.

This book constitutes the seventh official archival publication devoted to RoboCup. It documents the achievements presented at the 7th Robot World Cup Soccer and Rescue Competition and Conferences held in Padua, Italy, in July 2003. The 39 revised full papers and 35 revised poster papers presented together with an overview and roadmap for the RoboCup initiative and 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 symposium paper submissions. This book is mandatory reading for the rapidly growing RoboCup community as well as a valuable source of reference and inspiration for R&D professionals interested in robotics, distributed artificial intelligence, and multi-agent systems.

The Hybrid Deliberative Layer (HDL) solves the problem that an intelligent agent faces in dealing with a large amount of information which may or may not be useful in generating a plan to achieve a goal. The information, that an agent may need, is acquired and stored in the DL model. Thus, the HDL is used as the main knowledge base system for the agent. In this work, a novel approach which amalgamates Description Logic (DL) reasoning with Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is introduced. An analysis of the performance of the approach has been conducted and the results show that this approach yields significantly smaller planning problem descriptions than those generated by current representations in HTN planning.

The scientific literature in chemistry and physics abounds with abbreviations of chemical compounds, physical methods and mathematical procedures. Unfortunately, many authors take it for granted that the reader knows the meaning of an abbreviation, something quite trivial for a specialist. For the less informed reader, these abbreviations thus present definite communication problems. The Gmelin Institute of Inorganic Chemistry of the Max Planck Society has collected more than 4000 abbreviations for methods and terms from chemistry, physics and mathematics and more than 4000 chemical compounds (mostly ligands in coordination chemistry and standard reagents for physical and analytical methods). GABCOM and GABMET provide an overview enabling readers and authors to check the definition of an abbreviation used by an author and to see whether this abbreviation is already being used for other purposes. GABCOM and GABMET are also in preparation in electronic form (data file and search software) for IBM-PC or compatible computers.

This volume surveys three decades of modern robot control theory and describes how the work of Suguru Arimoto shaped its development. Twelve survey articles written by experts associated with Suguru Arimoto at various stages in his career treat the subject comprehensively. This book provides an important reference for graduate students and researchers, as well as for mathematicians, engineers and scientists whose work involves robot control theory.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of 5 workshops, held at the 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2011, in Taipei, Taiwan, May 2-6, 2011. The 37 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in sections on the workshops Agent-Based Modeling for Policy Engineering (AMPLE), Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), Autonomous Robots and Multirobot Systems (ARMS), Data Oriented Constructive Mining and Multi-Agent Simulation, Massively Multi-Agent Systems: Models, Methods and Tools (DOCM3AS), and Infrastructures and Tools for Multiagent Systems (ITMAS).

This convenient and flexible tool combines three books into one-a rhetoric, a research guide, and reader-- for an exceptional value. Also available in an alternate version with a Handbook section. Discussion of strategies for successful reading stresses the basic strategies to help read critically; the updated and expanded Argument Chapter includes new information on exploratory arguments and more suggestions on organizing arguments; the Research Paper chapter includes more information on using on-line catalogs and databases, material on using visuals in reports, and a very handy review that can be used as a checklist for those writing research papers. For those writing research papers, preparing arguments, or reading critically.