In this book, the author presents a new computational model of forestalling common flaws in autonomous robot behavior. To this end, robots are equipped with structured reactive plans (SRPs) which are concurrent control programs that can not only be interpreted but also be reasoned about and manipulated. The author develops a representation for SRPs in which declarative statements for goals, perceptions, and beliefs make the structure and purpose of SRPs explicit and thereby simplify and speed up reasoning about SRPs and their projections; furthermore a notation is introduced allowing for transforming and manipulating SRPs. Using this notation, a planning system can diagnose and forestall common flaws in robot plans that cannot be dealt with in other planning representations. Finally the language for writing SRPs is extended into a high-level language that can handle both planning and execution actions.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI-98, held in Bremen, Germany, in September 1998. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. Also included are three invited papers and abstracts of two invited talks, as well as an appendix containing up-to-date descriptions of German AI projects. Thus the volume gives a unique overview of AI research in Germany.

By presenting state-of-the-art results in logical reasoning and formal methods in the context of artificial intelligence and AI applications, this book commemorates the 60th birthday of Jörg H. Siekmann. The 30 revised reviewed papers are written by former and current students and colleagues of Jörg Siekmann; also included is an appraisal of the scientific career of Jörg Siekmann entitled "A Portrait of a Scientist: Logics, AI, and Politics." The papers are organized in four parts on logic and deduction, applications of logic, formal methods and security, and agents and planning.

For many years, Arti?cial Intelligence technology has served in a great variety of successful applications. AI researchand researchershave contributed much to the vision of the so-called Information Society. As early as the 1980s, some of us imagined distributed knowledge bases containing the explicable knowledge of a company or any other organization. Today, such systems are becoming reality. In the process, other technologies have had to be developed and AI-technology has blended with them, and companies are now sensitive to this topic. TheInternetandWWWhaveprovidedtheglobalinfrastructure,whileatthe same time companies have become global in nearly every aspect of enterprise. This process has just started, a little experience has been gained, and therefore it is tempting to re?ect and try to forecast, what the next steps may be. This has given us one of the two main topics of the 23rd Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI-99)held at the University of Bonn: The Knowledge Society. Two of our invited speakers, Helmut Willke, Bielefeld, and Hans-Peter Kriegel, Munich, dwell on di?erent aspects with di?erent perspectives. Helmut Willke deals with the concept of virtual organizations, while Hans-Peter Kriegel applies data mining concepts to pattern recognitiontasks.The three application forums are also part of the Knowledge Society topic: “IT-based innovation for environment and development”, “Knowledge management in enterprises”, and “Knowledgemanagementinvillageandcityplanningoftheinformationsociety”.

The second edition of this handbook provides a state-of-the-art overview on the various aspects in the rapidly developing field of robotics. Reaching for the human frontier, robotics is vigorously engaged in the growing challenges of new emerging domains. Interacting, exploring, and working with humans, the new generation of robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The credible prospect of practical robots among humans is the result of the scientific endeavour of a half a century of robotic developments that established robotics as a modern scientific discipline. The ongoing vibrant expansion and strong growth of the field during the last decade has fueled this second edition of the Springer Handbook of Robotics. The first edition of the handbook soon became a landmark in robotics publishing and won the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics as well as the organization’s Award for Engineering & Technology. The second edition of the handbook, edited by two internationally renowned scientists with the support of an outstanding team of seven part editors and more than 200 authors, continues to be an authoritative reference for robotics researchers, newcomers to the field, and scholars from related disciplines. The contents have been restructured to achieve four main objectives: the enlargement of foundational topics for robotics, the enlightenment of design of various types of robotic systems, the extension of the treatment on robots moving in the environment, and the enrichment of advanced robotics applications. Further to an extensive update, fifteen new chapters have been introduced on emerging topics, and a new generation of authors have joined the handbook’s team. A novel addition to the second edition is a comprehensive collection of multimedia references to more than 700 videos, which bring valuable insight into the contents. The videos can be viewed directly augmented into the text with a smartphone or tablet using a unique and specially designed app. Springer Handbook of Robotics Multimedia Extension Portal: http://handbookofrobotics.org/

The Intelligent Techniques for Planning presents a number of modern approaches to the area of automated planning. These approaches combine methods from classical planning such as the construction of graphs and the use of domain-independent heuristics with techniques from other areas of artificial intelligence. This book discuses, in detail, a number of state-of-the-art planning systems that utilize constraint satisfaction techniques in order to deal with time and resources, machine learning in order to utilize experience drawn from past runs, methods from knowledge systems for more expressive representation of knowledge and ideas from other areas such as Intelligent Agents. Apart from the thorough analysis and implementation details, each chapter of the book also provides extensive background information about its subject and presents and comments on similar approaches done in the past.