SPOT is a quadruped robot "dog" from the Boston Dynamics company. It can be difficult for rescue personnel to reach an injured person in inaccessible terrain in time to provide necessary aid. It is probable that autonomous drones and quadruped robot "dogs" will become our'friends in need' in the future. But we are currently far from achieving full autonomy for these robotic systems. Consequently, well-functioning collaboration between human and machine is crucial. A moment later, a yellow quadruped robot makes its way across the well-manicured lawns of Gränsö Manor.

This article discusses a workshop held in conjunction with the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), held in Acapulco, Mexico, on 11 August 2003. However, much of the work does not take into account real-time constraints typically associated with many agent applications in addition to the incomplete and dynamic nature of the embedding environments. For example, in environments where a number of agents build teams, and both singleagent and collaborative decisions have to be made, such decisions have to be generated rapidly and in the appropriate time windows to be useful. Such topics include world modeling, planning, learning, agent communication, and software architectures. Within this general theme, the aim was to bring together researchers from different communities working with both robots and softbots (for example, RoboCup, cognitive robotics, intelligent autonomous vehicles).