I Have a Robot, and I’m Not Afraid to Use It!

I Have a Robot, and I'm Not Afraid to Use It! The AAMAS community is investing efforts to encourage robotics research within itself. An annual robotics special track, an associated robotics workshop (Autonomous Robots and Multirobot Systems), and a series of exciting AAMAS-sponsored plenary speakers and awards over a number of years are drawing roboticists in. The number of robotics papers is increasing. There are fruitful interactions with the other communities within AAMAS, such as virtual agents, game theory, and machine learning. Robots are being used both to inspire AAMAS research as well as to conduct it. I posit that the growing success of robotics at AAMAS is due not only to the nurturing efforts of the AAMAS community, but mainly to the increasing recognition of an important, deeper, truth: robots are agents.