Planning is among the characteristic features of intelligence and therefore it is a central research topic of Intellectics since its beginning. Although planning is a very hard task, recent planning systems have achieved an astonishing performance and are applied in various fields. One reason for the success of these systems lies, among others, in the exploitation of structural properties that are present in many but not all problems. The use of such structural properties therefore leads to a specialization on a class of problems. Their exploitation is often conducted by a preprocessing step, i.e., by the application of a special algorithm prior to the search for a plan. This work identifies and examines the class of c-invariants as such a structural property of planning problems. c-Invariants are state invariants and are present in many problems of practical interest. Building on the features of c-invariants, the dissertation presents path reduction, a preprocessing technique that can significantly simplify planning problems. Finally, the work describes an implementation of path reduction and examines its application.

This book constitutes selected papers presented during the Third China Annual Intelligent Robotics Conference, CCF CIRAC 2022, held in Xi' an, China, in December 2022. The 35 papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from the 120 qualified submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: robot safety; intelligent robot sensing; autonomous robot navigation; artificial intelligence and cloud robot; unmanned cluster collaboration; natural human-computer interaction; other robot-related technologies.

Motion plays a crucial role in computer games.

Path planning and navigation are indispensable components for controlling autonomous agents in interactive virtual worlds. Given the growing demands on the size and complexity of modern virtual worlds, a number of new techniques have been developed for achieving intelligent navigation for the next generation of interactive multi-agent simulations. This book reviews the evolution of several related techniques, starting from classical planning and computational geometry techniques and then gradually moving toward more advanced topics with focus on recent developments from the work of the authors. The covered topics range from discrete search and geometric representations to planning under different types of constraints and harnessing the power of graphics hardware in order to address Euclidean shortest paths and discrete search for multiple agents under limited time budgets. The use of planning algorithms beyond path planning is also discussed in the areas of crowd animation and whole-body motion planning for virtual characters.

This book gathers the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Frontier Computing, held in Singapore, on July 10–13, 2020, and provides comprehensive coverage of the latest advances and trends in information technology, science, and engineering. It addresses a number of broad themes, including communication networks, business intelligence and knowledge management, web intelligence, and related fields that inspire the development of information technology. The respective contributions cover a wide range of topics: database and data mining, networking and communications, web and Internet of things, embedded systems, soft computing, social network analysis, security and privacy, optical communication, and ubiquitous/pervasive computing. Many of the papers outline promising future research directions, and the book benefits students, researchers, and professionals alike. Further, it offers a useful reference guide for newcomers to the field.

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization have increasingly played a larger and more important role in many aspects of military sciences, biology, communications, robotics, and decision making. At the same time, cooperative systems are notoriously difficult to model, analyze, and solve — while intuitively understood, they are not axiomatically defined in any commonly accepted manner. The works in this volume provide outstanding insights into this very complex area of research. They are the result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Fourth Annual Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization held in Destin, Florida, November 2003.This book has been selected for coverage in:• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings® (ISTP® / ISI Proceedings)• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)• CC Proceedings — Engineering & Physical Sciences