Acting, Planning, and Learning

An overview of AI's next big challenge: integrating the essential cognitive functions needed by robots and other automated agents.

AI's next big challenge is integrating and automating the essential cognitive abilities of acting, planning, and learning. This comprehensive overview covers a range of models –deterministic, probabilistic (including MDP and reinforcement learning), hierarchical, nondeterministic, temporal, spatial – and applications in robotics.AI's next big challenge is to master the cognitive abilities needed by intelligent agents that perform actions. Such agents may be physical devices such as robots, or they may act in simulated or virtual environments through graphic animation or electronic web transactions. This book is about integrating and automating these essential cognitive abilities: planning what actions to undertake and under what conditions, acting (choosing what steps to execute, deciding how and when to execute them, monitoring their execution, and reacting to events), and learning about ways to act and plan. This comprehensive, coherent synthesis covers a range of state-of-the-art approaches and models –deterministic, probabilistic (including MDP and reinforcement learning), hierarchical, nondeterministic, temporal, spatial, and LLMs –and applications in robotics. The insights it provides into important techniques and research challenges will make it invaluable to researchers and practitioners in AI, robotics, cognitive science, and autonomous and interactive systems.