Intelligent embodied autonomous agents

The Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents(Agents’ 98) was held in 1998 in Minneapolis/St. Paul. The stated goal of the conference was to “ . . . bring together researchers and developers from industry and academia in order to report on the latest scientific and technical advances, discuss and debate the major issues, and showcase the latest systems”. Autonomous agents are defined as “. . . computer systems that are capable of independent action in dynamic, unpredictable environments”. The conference was a great success and brought together researchers from diverse backgrounds such as information retrieval and filtering, user interface design and autonomous robotics. This special issue of Robotics and Autonomous Systems is a collection of selected papers from Agents ’98. All the papers in this issue report on work with physically situated agents (robots). Several aspects of embodied agent autonomy are covered including control architectures, learning and adaptation as well as coordination and cooperation. The selected papers from the conference were revised and extended by the authors. Each paper was subjected to an additional review process. A brief summary of the issue is as follows: The paper byYamauchiproposes a robust cooperation strategy for multiple robots to explore an unknown environment. The system has been implemented on real robots performing an indoor mapping task.