We define an admissibility condition for abstractions expressed using angelic semantics and show that these conditions allow us to accelerate planning while preserving the ability to find the optimal motion plan. We then derive admissible abstractions for two motion planning domains with continuous state. We extract upper and lower bounds on the cost of concrete motion plans using local metric and topological properties of the problem domain. These bounds guide the search for a plan while maintaining performance guarantees. We show that abstraction can dramatically reduce the complexity of search relative to a direct motion planner. Using our abstractions, we find near-optimal motion plans in planning problems involving $10^{13}$ states without using a separate task planner.

Early next year, the Springer Nature publishing group will launch a new subscription journal devoted to artificial intelligence. Like its other journals, Nature will impose a pay wall and restrict access to paying customers--a move that isn't going over well with AI researchers, who say a for-profit subscription journal is not what the field needs right now. Scheduled for launch in January 2019, the new journal will be called Nature Machine Intelligence, and it'll be the 53rd journal to bear the illustrious Nature name. The new online-only journal, headed by editor-in-chief Liesbeth Venema (previously a physics editor at Nature), will cover the "best research from across the field of artificial intelligence," and will include research and perspectives from the "fast-moving" fields of AI, machine learning, and robotics. But if a petition organized by Tom Dietterich from the International Machine Learning Society and a computer scientist at Oregon University is any indication, the new journal won't include content from a sizable portion of the AI research community.

To avoid the paper being thrown in the bin we provide this with a large, negative reward, say -1, and because the teacher is please with it being placed in the bin this nets a large positive reward, 1. To avoid the outcome where it continually gets passed around the room, we set the reward for all other actions to be a small, negative value, say -0.04. If we set this as a positive or null number then the model may let the paper go round and round as it would be better to gain small positives than risk getting close to the negative outcome. This number is also very small as it will only collect a single terminal reward but it could take many steps to end the episode and we need to ensure that, if the paper is place in the bin, the positive outcome is not cancelled out. Please note, the rewards are always relative to one another and I have chosen arbitrary figures but these can be changed if the results are not as desired.

This paper presents a novel data-driven approach to vehicle motion planning and control in off-road driving scenarios. For autonomous off-road driving, environmental conditions impact terrain traversability as a function of weather, surface composition, and slope. Geographical information system (GIS) and National Centers for Environmental Information datasets are processed to provide this information for interactive planning and control system elements. A top-level global route planner (GRP) defines optimal waypoints using dynamic programming (DP). A local path planner (LPP) computes a desired trajectory between waypoints such that infeasible control states and collisions with obstacles are avoided. The LPP also updates the GRP with real-time sensing and control data. A low-level feedback controller applies feedback linearization to asymptotically track the specified LPP trajectory. Autonomous driving simulation results are presented for traversal of terrains in Oregon and Indiana case studies.

We present an extension of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) that strongly increases its efficiency for trees with asymmetry and/or loops. Asymmetric termination of search trees introduces a type of uncertainty for which the standard upper confidence bound (UCB) formula does not account. Our first algorithm (MCTS-T), which assumes a non-stochastic environment, backs-up tree structure uncertainty and leverages it for exploration in a modified UCB formula. Results show vastly improved efficiency in a well-known asymmetric domain in which MCTS performs arbitrarily bad. Next, we connect the ideas about asymmetric termination to the presence of loops in the tree, where the same state appears multiple times in a single trace. An extension to our algorithm (MCTS-T+), which in addition to non-stochasticity assumes full state observability, further increases search efficiency for domains with loops as well. Benchmark testing on a set of OpenAI Gym and Atari 2600 games indicates that our algorithms always perform better than or at least equivalent to standard MCTS, and could be first-choice tree search algorithms for non-stochastic, fully-observable environments.

MAOS-FSP [1] is a multiagent optimization system (MAOS) for solving the Flowshop Scheduling Problem (FSP). MAOS-FSP shares the MAOS kernel with other MAOS applications (e.g. MAOS-GCP and MAOS-TSP), and contains some modules that are specifically for tacking FSP. Related Information: Please find other related code and software in our Source Code Library. License information: MAOS-FSP is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial License 3.0.

As industries journey towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where people and robots will work together seamlessly, it's becoming more important than ever for organisations to integrate artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and the internet of things (IoT) into their digital game plan. However, much like policy makers, business leaders are struggling to keep up with these advancements. They're failing to leverage technology in areas such as human resources, payroll and workforce management. According to Deloitte's Human Capital Trends Report 2018, almost 95% of organisations worldwide don't know how to manage their workforce effectively. It's a confronting statistic and it's one Jarrod McGrath, founder and CEO of strategic workforce management consultancy Smart WFM, has set out to change. "I couldn't believe how high this figure was," says Jarrod.

A modern radar may be designed to perform multiple functions, such as surveillance, tracking, and fire control. Each function requires the radar to execute a number of transmit-receive tasks. A radar resource management (RRM) module makes decisions on parameter selection, prioritization, and scheduling of such tasks. RRM becomes especially challenging in overload situations, where some tasks may need to be delayed or even dropped. In general, task scheduling is an NP-hard problem. In this work, we develop the branch-and-bound (B&B) method which obtains the optimal solution but at exponential computational complexity. On the other hand, heuristic methods have low complexity but provide relatively poor performance. We resort to machine learning-based techniques to address this issue; specifically we propose an approximate algorithm based on the Monte Carlo tree search method. Along with using bound and dominance rules to eliminate nodes from the search tree, we use a policy network to help to reduce the width of the search. Such a network can be trained using solutions obtained by running the B&B method offline on problems with feasible complexity. We show that the proposed method provides near-optimal performance, but with computational complexity orders of magnitude smaller than the B&B algorithm.

While Artificial Intelligence and automation technologies is still nascent, the building blocks exist to suggest that Machine Learning could ease the burden of complex analysis, surface insights and trigger actions on behalf of managers. Workforce management is essentially the art and science of managing people in order to have a productive workforce. While there is a lot of science and methodology around this domain, with many current modern methods evolving from the foundational scientific management techniques propounded by Taylor over a century ago, it still requires the fine art of understanding an individual's capabilities and balancing human expectations to get the most out of people. Traditionally, in high empathy countries like India, this has largely been the responsibility of the manager, who balances an organisation's needs with individual wants and abilities. In short, the manager decides who needs to do what, when and where.

Hybrid manufacturing (HM) technologies combine additive and subtractive manufacturing (AM/SM) capabilities, leveraging AM's strengths in fabricating complex geometries and SM's precision and quality to produce finished parts. We present a systematic approach to automated computer-aided process planning (CAPP) for HM that can identify nontrivial, qualitatively distinct, and cost-optimal combinations of AM/SM modalities. A multimodal HM process plan is represented by a finite Boolean expression of AM and SM manufacturing primitives, such that the expression evaluates to an'as-manufactured' artifact. We show that primitives that respect spatial constraints such as accessibility and collision avoidance may be constructed by solving inverse configuration space problems on the'as-designed' artifact and manufacturing instruments. The primitives generate a finite Boolean algebra (FBA) that enumerates the entire search space for planning. The FBA's canonical intersection terms (i.e., 'atoms') provide the complete domain decomposition to reframe manufacturability analysis and process planning into purely symbolic reasoning, once a subcollection of atoms is found to be interchangeable with the design target. We demonstrate the practical potency of our framework and its computational efficiency when applied to process planning of complex 3D parts with dramatically different AM and SM instruments. Keywords: 1. Introduction Hybrid Manufacturing, Process Planning, Spatial Reasoning, Additive Manufacturing, Machining Hybrid manufacturing (HM), combining the capabilities of additive and subtractive manufacturing, is the new frontier of part fabrication. While additive manufacturing (AM) continues to enable unprecedented levels of structural complexity and customization, subtractive manufacturing (SM) remains indispensable for producing highprecision, mission-critical, and reliable mechanical components with functional interfaces. Versatile'multitasking' machines with simultaneous high-axis computer numerical control (CNC) of multiple AM and SM instruments (e.g., deposition heads and cutting tools) keep emerging on the market, enabling efficient use-cases for fabrication and repair (reviewed in Section 1.1).