Special Issue on Reintegrating Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Excerpt

Making robots intelligent means rendering them capable of reasoning about their environment, planning to achieve goals, enacting plans in the real world, and reacting to unforeseen events. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) was born of the need to provide these skills, and has since branched into different sub-disciplines, including perception, knowledge representation and reasoning, planning, interaction, and learning. Research in these fields has led to fantastic innovations, many of which have been featured in special issues of the KI journal. Yet, despite more than half a century of innovations, AI has not fully achieved the promise of making robots intelligent. Researchers in AI have clustered around abstractions of real-world problems. Often, these reflect simplifying assumptions that do not hold in the case of physically situated and embodied robot systems. Difficult and diverse challenges emerge from the need to use AI methods with and for robot systems, including bridging the percept-symbol gap, interacting with and learning from humans, integrating task and motion planning, and combining systems to build complete robotic solutions. …