Motivated by the problem of automatically composing network accessible services, such as those on the World Wide Web, this paper proposes an approach to building agent technology based on the notion of generic procedures and customizing user constraint. We argue that an augmented version of the logic programming language Golog provides a natural formalism for automatically composing services on the Semantic Web. To this end, we adapt and extend the Golog language to enable programs that are generic, customizable and usable in the context of the Web. Further, we propose logical criteria for these generic procedures that define when they are knowledge self-sufficient and physically selfsufficient. To support information gathering combined with search, we propose a middle-ground Golog interpreter that operates under an assumption of reasonable persistence of certain information. These contributions are realized in our augmentation of a ConGolog interpreter that combines online execution of information-providing Web services with offline simulation of worldaltering Web services, to determine a sequence of Web Services for subsequent execution. Our implemented system is currently interacting with services on the Web. 1

This article describes the software architecture of an autonomous, interactive tour-guide robot. It presents a modular and distributed software architecture, which integrates localization, mapping, collision avoidance, planning, and various modules concerned with user interaction and Web-based telepresence. At its heart, the software approach relies on probabilistic computation, on-line learning, and any-time algorithms. It enables robots to operate safely, reliably, and at high speeds in highly dynamic environments, and does not require any modifications of the environment to aid the robot's operation. Special emphasis is placed on the design of interactive capabilities that appeal to people's intuition. The interface provides new means for human-robot interaction with crowds of people in public places, and it also provides people all around the world with the ability to establish a "virtual telepresence" using the Web. To illustrate our approach, results are reported obtained in mid-...

As an alternative to planning, an approach to high-level agent control based on concurrent program execution is considered. The language includes facilities for prioritizing the concurrent execution, interrupting the execution when certain conditions become true, and dealing with exogenous actions. The language di ers from other procedural formalisms for concurrency in that the initial state can be incompletely speci ed and the primitive actions can be user-de ned by axioms in the situation calculus. In a companion paper, a formal de nition in the situation calculus of such a programming language is presented and illustrated with detailed examples. In this paper, the mathematical properties of the programming language are explored. 1

Renewed motives for space exploration have inspired NASA to work toward the goal of establishing a virtual presence in space, through heterogeneous effets of robotic explorers. Information technology, and Artificial Intelligence in particular, will play a central role in this endeavor by endowing these explorers with a form of computational intelligence that we call remote agents. In this paper we describe the Remote Agent, a specific autonomous agent architecture based on the principles of model-based programming, on-board deduction and search, and goal-directed closed-loop commanding, that takes a significant step toward enabling this future. This architecture addresses the unique characteristics of the spacecraft domain that require highly reliable autonomous operations over long periods of time with tight deadlines, resource constraints, and concurrent activity among tightly coupled subsystems. The Remote Agent integrates constraint-based temporal planning and scheduling, robust multi-threaded execution, and model-based mode identification and reconfiguration. The demonstration of the integrated system as an on-board controller for Deep Space One, NASA's rst New Millennium mission, is scheduled for a period of a week in late 1998. The development of the Remote Agent also provided the opportunity to reassess some of AI's conventional wisdom about the challenges of implementing embedded systems, tractable reasoning, and knowledge representation. We discuss these issues, and our often contrary experiences, throughout the paper.

This paper describes the software architecture of an autonomous tour-guide/tutor robot. This robot was recently deployed in the “Deutsches Museum Bonn, ” were it guided hundreds of visitors through the museum during a six-day deployment period. The robot’s control software integrates low-level probabilistic reasoning with high-level problem solving embedded in first order logic. A collection of software innovations, described in this paper, enabled the robot to navigate at high speeds through dense crowds, while reliably avoiding collisions with obstacles—some of which could not even be perceived. Also described in this paper is a user interface tailored towards non-expert users, which was essential for the robot’s success in the museum. Based on these experiences, this paper argues that time is ripe for the development of AI-based commercial service robots that assist people in everyday life.

Inspired by game theory representations, Bayesian networks, influence diagrams, structured Markov decision process models, logic programming, and work in dynamical systems, the independent choice logic (ICL) is a semantic framework that allows for independent choices (made by various agents, including nature) and a logic program that gives the consequence of choices. This representation can be used as a specification for agents that act in a world, make observations of that world and have memory, as well as a modelling tool for dynamic environments with uncertainty. The rules specify the consequences of an action, what can be sensed and the utility of outcomes. This paper presents a possible-worlds semantics for ICL, and shows how to embed influence diagrams, structured Markov decision processes, and both the strategic (normal) form and extensive (game-tree) form of games within the Thanks to Craig Boutilier and Holger Hoos for detailed comments on this paper. This work was supporte...

Abstract. Software engineers continually strive to develop tools and techniques to manage the complexity that is inherent in software systems. In this article, we argue that intelligent agents and multi-agent systems are just such tools. We begin by reviewing what is meant by the term “agent”, and contrast agents with objects. We then go on to examine a number of prototype techniques proposed for engineering agent systems, including methodologies for agent-oriented analysis and design, formal specification and verification methods for agent systems, and techniques for implementing agent specifications. 1

Automated composition of Web Services can be achieved by using AI planning techniques. Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is especially well-suited for this task. In this paper, we describe how HTN planning system SHOP2 can be used with OWL-S Web Service descriptions. We provide a sound and complete algorithm to translate OWL-S service descriptions to a SHOP2 domain. We prove the correctness of the algorithm by showing the correspondence to the situation calculus semantics of OWL-S. We implemented a system that plans over sets of OWL-S descriptions using SHOP2 and then executes the resulting plans over the Web. The system is also capable of executing information-providing Web Services during the planning process. We discuss the challenges and difficulties of using planning in the information-rich and human-oriented context of Web Services.

We proposea framework for robot programming which allows the seamless integration of explicit agent programming with decision-theoretic planning. Specifically, the DTGolog model allows one to partially specify a control program in a highlevel, logical language, and provides an interpreter that, given a logical axiomatization of a domain, will determine the optimal completion of that program (viewed as a Markov decision process). We demonstrate the utility of this model with results obtained in an office delivery robotics domain. 1 Introduction The construction of autonomous agents, such as mobile robots or software agents, is paramount in artificial intelligence, with considerable research devoted to methods that will ease the burden of designing controllers for such agents. There are two main ways in which the conceptual complexity of devising controllers can be managed. The first is to provide languages with which a programmer can specify a control program with relative eas...

Composition of Web services has received much interest to support business-to-business or enterprise application integration. On the one side, the business world has developed a number of XML-based standards to formalize the specification of Web services, their flow composition and execution. This approach is primarily syntactical: Web service interfaces are like remote procedure call and the interaction protocols are manually written. On the other side, the Semantic Web community focuses on reasoning about web resources by explicitly declaring their preconditions and effects with terms precisely defined in ontologies. For the composition of Web services, they draw on the goal-oriented inferencing from planning. So far, both approaches have been developed rather independently from each other. We compare these approaches...