[agents] Call for papers - Special Issue on Hybrid Control of Autonomous Systems - Integrating Learning, Deliberation and Reactive Control

[Nils T Siebel]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems:
Special Issue on Hybrid Control of Autonomous Systems

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

High-level control for Autonomous Systems (e.g. robots) is concerned
with selecting the next action the system should perform. In particular
this means that the system must be endowed with algorithms or schemes
to take the next step towards its mission goal. The known paradigms for
this action selection problem are learning, deliberation, reactive
control schemes or combinations of these schemes, i.e. hybrid approaches.

Learning has been applied successfully to many robotics tasks. Most of
the work is related to learning certain basic behaviors or skills.
Examples where the high-level control strategy of robots (or agents)
were successfully learned are rare. The deliberative approach for
decision making of autonomous systems was successfully treated in
research on Artificial Intelligence, following a top-down approach,
which has severe limitations in real applications. In the reactive
control paradigm the idea is that through a combination of purely
reactive action selection schemes intelligent and goal-directed
behaviors emerge, which can be seen as a bottom-up approach.

These paradigms have been known for over two decades, and in today's
applications often combinations of learning, deliberation, and reactive
control are used. Usually these combinations are used in an ad-hoc or
even unconscious fashion. Although there is a number of proposed
architectures and huge body of literature, the issue of combining
learning, reactive and deliberative control never has been intensively
investigated.

This special issue aims to survey a state of the art of hybrid systems
and to compile a collection of the problems, the challenges, and the
solutions of autonomous systems, i.e. robots or agent systems that make
use of hybrid approaches for high-level control. A particular emphasis
lies on the hybrid aspects of the presented approach.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

Areas of interest include (but are not restricted to) hybrid decision
making, modeling of application domains which demands for hybrid
control and related with this the required capabilities/affordances
and needed robot behaviors. We solicit original work from the fields
of Agent Learning, Cognitive Robotics, and Behavior-based Control,
deploying a hybrid approach for high-level control.

As a follow-up of the HYCAS workshop at the IJCAI-09 we invite in
particular workshop participants to submit profoundly extended versions
of their workshop submission, which suits this special issue. The call
is nevertheless open to other interested researchers.

Papers should be typeset according to the format instructions for the
Robotics and Autonomous Systems journal, available on the Elsevier web
site. The length should not exceed 22 pages in the above format
(single column).

Please e-mail your submission in PDF format to the editors at the
address ras10 at hycas.org.
Other, non-standard formats (e.g., Word) cannot be accepted. In the body
of the e-mail message, please specify the following:

   * Paper title
   * Name, e-mail address and affiliation of all authors
   * Phone, fax and postal address of the corresponding author
   * Keywords (maximum 5)
   * Abstract (maximum 200 words)

All submissions will be acknowledged within a few days. Please contact
the guest editors if you do not receive an acknowledgment.

GUEST EDITORS

Alexander Ferrein
Robotics and Agents Research Lab
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Nils T Siebel
Cognitive Systems Group
Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Germany

Gerald Steinbauer
Institute for Software Technology
Graz University of Technology, Austria


IMPORTANT DATES

   * November 15 2009: Paper submission deadline
   * January 15 2010: Notification of paper acceptance
   * February 15 2010: Camera ready paper submission
   * Late Spring 2010: Expected publication date


CONTACT

Please contact the guest editors at the e-mail address ras10 "at" hycas.org
for inquiries about the special issue.

MORE INFORMATION

http://www.hycas.org/RAS10/

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