Recent Books

Artificial systems that think and behave intelligently are one of the most exciting and challenging goals of Artificial Intelligence. Action Programming is the art and science of devising high-level control strategies for autonomous systems which employ a mental model of their environment and which reason about their actions as a means to achieve their goals. Applications of this programming paradigm include autonomous software agents, mobile robots with high-level reasoning capabilities, and General Game Playing.

These lecture notes give an in-depth introduction to the current state-of-the-art in action programming. The main topics are

• Knowledge representation for actions
• Procedural action programming
• Planning
• Agent logic programs
• Reactive, behavior-based agents

The only prerequisite for understanding the material in these lecture notes is some general programming experience and basic knowledge of classical first-order logic.

The design of autonomous agents, including robots, is one of the most exciting and challenging goals of Artificial Intelligence. Reasoning robotic agents constitute a link between knowledge representation and reasoning on the one hand, and agent programming and robot control on the other. This book provides a uniform mathematical model for the problem-driven, top-down design of rational agents, which use reasoning for decision making, planning, and troubleshooting. The implementation of the mathematical model by a general PROLOG program allows readers to practice the design of reasoning robotic agents. Since all implementation details are given, the generic system can be easily modified and extended.