Cognitive Robotics

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1998 Fall Symposium Series on 23 to 25 October at the Omni Rosen Hotel in Orlando, Florida. This article contains summaries of seven of the symposia that were conducted: (1) Cognitive Robotics; (2) Distributed, Continual Planning; (3) Emotional and Intelligent: The Tangled Knot of Cognition; (4) Integrated Planning for Autonomous Agent Architectures; (5) Planning with Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes; (6) Reasoning with Visual and Diagrammatic Representations; and (7) Robotics and Biology: Developing Connections. Research in cognitive robotics is concerned with the theory and implementation of robots that reason, act, and perceive in changing incompletely known, unpredictable environments. Such robots must have higherlevel cognitive functions that involve, for example, reasoning about goals, actions, the cognitive states of other agents, and time as well as when to perceive and what to look for.