The Department of Computer Science at Louisiana State University (LSU) has been involved in robotics research since 1992 when the Robotics Research Laboratory (RRL) was established as a research and teaching program specializing in autonomous mobile robots (AMRS). Researchers at RRL are conducting high-quality research in amrs with the goal of identifying the computational problems and the types of knowledge that are fundamental to the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robotic systems. In this article, we overview the projects that are currently under way at LSU's RRL.

Recent attempts to develop larger and more complex knowledge-based systems have revealed the shortcomings and problems of centralized, single-agent architectures and have acted as a springboard for research in distributed AI (DAI). Although initial research efforts in DAI concentrated on issues relating to homogeneous systems (that is, systems using agents of a similar type or with similar knowledge), there is now increasing interest in systems comprised of heterogeneous components. The workshop on cooperation among heterogeneous intelligent agents, held July 15 during the 1991 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was organized by Evangelos Simoudis, Mark Adler, Michael Huhns, and Edmund Durfee. It was designed to bring together researchers and practitioners who are studying how to enable a heterogeneous collection of independent intelligent systems to cooperate in solving problems that require their combined abilities.

We can take planning to be the optimization and debugging of a robot's program by reasoning about possible courses of execution. It is necessary to the extent that fragments of robot programs are combined at run time. There are several strands of research in the field; I survey six: (1) attempts to avoid planning; (2) the design of flexible plan notations; (3) theories of time-constrained planning; (4) planning by projecting and repairing faulty plans; (5) motion planning; and (6) the learning of optimal behaviors from reinforcements. However, we are already beginning to see how to mesh plan execution with plan generation and learning.

My Ph.D. dissertation (Goel 1989) presents a computational model of experience-based design. It first reviews the core issues in experience-based design, for example, (1) the content of a design experience (or case), (2) the internal organization of design cases, (3) the language for indexing the cases, (4) the mechanism for retrieving a case relevant to a given design task, (5) the mechanism for adapting a retrieved design to satisfy the constraints of the design task, (6) the mechanism for evaluating a design against the specification of the design task, (7) the mechanism for redesigning a failed design, (8) the mechanism for acquiring new design knowledge, (9) the mechanism for chunking information about a design into a new case, and (10) the mechanism for storing a new case in memory for potential reuse in the future. It then proposes that decisions about these issues might lie in the designer's comprehension of the designs of artifacts he/she has encountered in the past, that is, in his/her mental models of how the designs achieve the functions and satisfy the constraints of the artifacts.

The Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (ISAI) was held in Cancun, Mexico, 13-15 November 1991. What, another international AI conference, you say? The first symposium was held in 1988. This fourth consecutive annual conference drew the participation of visitors from several international AI communities, including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Japan, England, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, China, Belgium, Australia, and Singapore -- an impressive breadth of participants for a conference that has existed for only four years.

The Quest for the Thinking Computer

I agree with much of what Dr. Levinson has to say, especially

We summarize the Among the workshop's principal The in using these systems, and (6) computer represent the same knowledge differently workshop on cooperation among environments that facilitate to optimize their particular use heterogeneous intelligent agents, cooperation among human problem of it, or agents could obtain knowledge held July 15 during the 1991 National solvers of diverse abilities. DAI system can use as agents a collection and Edmund Durfee. It was designed Fifty submissions were received, and of existing knowledge-based to bring together researchers and 43 contributors were invited to the systems that have been developed practitioners who are studying how workshop. The workshop had four under a variety of implementation to enable a heterogeneous collection sessions that covered the topics of philosophies. In particular, representations create a special type of agent that is Fifth, agents negotiate and converge must be agreed on able to act as a broker to each of the on decisions by making deals (either before invocation or as a existing agents that need to participate under various types of pressure. Methods must also in a blackboard architecture, so it can be created for agents to assimilate cooperate with other agents.

An effective to develop an abstract UI model which solution to this problem must have three encompasses the essence of those systems.

Alan Turing's decades-old question still influences artificial intelligence because of the simple test he proposed in his article in Mind. In this article, AI Magazine collects presentations about the first round of the classic Turing Test of machine intelligence, held November 8, 1991 at The Computer Museum, Boston. Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, and an adjunct professor of psychology, Boston University, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and University of California (San Diego) summarizes some of the difficult issues during the planning of this first real-time competition, and describes the event. Presented in tandem with Dr. Epstein's article is the actual transcript of session that won the Loebner Prize Competition--Joseph Weintraub's computer program PC Therapist. In 1985 an old friend, Hugh Loebner, told me The intricacies of setting up a real Turing Test excitedly that the Turing Test should be made that would ultimately yield a legitimate into an annual contest. We were ambling winner were enormous. Small points were down a Manhattan street on our way to occasionally debated for months without dinner, as I recall. Hugh was always full of clear resolution. Turing, proposed a variation on a simple Four years later, while serving as the director parlor game as a means for identifying a of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, machine that can think: A human judge an advanced studies institute in Massachusetts, interacts with two computer terminals, one I established the Loebner Prize controlled by a computer and the other by a Competition, the first serious effort to locate person, but the judge doesn't know which is a machine that can pass the Turing Test. If, after a prolonged conversation at Hugh had come through with a pledge of each terminal, the judge can't tell the difference, $100,000 for the prize money, along with we'd have to say, asserted Turing, that some additional funds from his company, in some sense the computer is thinking. Crown Industries, to help with expenses. The Computers barely existed in Turing's day, but, quest for the thinking computer had begun. I'll then describe that After much debate, the Loebner Prize Committee first event, which took place on November 8, ultimately rejected Turing's simple 1991, at The Computer Museum in Boston two-terminal design in favor of one that is and offer a summary of some of the data generated more discriminating and less problematic. Finally, I'll speculate The two-terminal design is troublesome for about the future of the competition--now an several reasons, among them: The design presumes annual event, as Hugh envisioned--and that the hidden human--the human about its significance to the AI community.