Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series

Over the past decade new approaches have emerged that have revolutionized the design of intelligent robotic systems. Even more recently, research on autonomous agents has undergone a renaissance as it has progressed from its roots in distributed AI. This new series, Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents, joins these research communities together and focuses on their commonalities, such as emergent intelligence, coordinated activity, and situatedness. The series is unique in that it provides a new synergistic perspective that juxtaposes the cognitive and organizational research developed within the autonomous agents community with the hardware-oriented behavioral methods found in today’s robotics research laboratories. The new paradigm for intelligent robotics focuses on physical embodiment. It has concentrated predominantly on lower forms of biological life as an inspiration for the design of robot control systems by exploring reactive and hybrid behavior-based systems, evolutionary and reinforcement learning methods, and enabling perceptual paradigms such as active vision and task-oriented perception. Research on autonomous agents has often concentrated on higher cognitive and organizational activity such as inter-agent communication, negotiation, coordination, conflict, and social behavior. Most results from this community have software embodiments as opposed to their robotic counterparts. The series will concentrate on volumes that advance the theory, design, and practice of intelligent robots and autonomous agents. Contributions are encouraged from across the broad range of disciplines-computer science, engineering, the biosciences (neuroscience, psychology, ethology), organizational behavior, and economics-that are contributing to progress in these areas. For information on the submission of proposals and manuscripts, please contact any of the series editors or the publisher, Elizabeth Swayze (epswayze@mit.edu).