A Discrete Event System (DES) is a discrete state space dynamic system that evolves in accordance with the instantaneous occurrence, at possibly unkown times, of physical events. Given a DES, its behavior (the sequence of displayed events) may not satisfy…

Virtual Worlds Generator is a grammatical model that is proposed to define virtual worlds. It integrates the diversity of sensors and interaction devices, multimodality and a virtual simulation system. Its grammar allows the definition and abstraction in symbols strings of…

MACSimJX provides the means for advanced modelling and development of multiagent driven control systems. This is achieved by drawing together two modelling tools used extensively in their respective communities. These are Simulink, a tool used for control systems development and…

The purpose of this study was to examine how children think about and attribute features of friendship to a robot after a brief interaction with one. Children visiting a science centre located in a major Western Canadian city were randomly…

The ability of building robust semantic space representations of environments is crucial for the development of truly autonomous robots. This task, inherently connected with cognition, is traditionally achieved by training the robot with a supervised learning phase. We argue that…

This special issue of the Journal of Physical Agents is devoted to multi-robot systems. Some might perhaps argue that the term should have been ”multi-agent systems” or ”physical multi-agent systems”, in accordance with the title of the journal. In any…

This paper briefly introduces a summary of the special session on Hybrid Reasoning and Coordination Methods on Multi-Agent Systems, held in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems 2009 (HAIS’09). The research papers of this session…

This special issue of the Journal of Physical Agents is devoted to human interaction with domestic robots. The form, features and future, of domestic robotic devices, from entertainment-based agents through to robotic cleaners, companions, assistants and helpers, are considered and…

The Workshop of Physical Agents intends to be a forum for information and experience exchange in different areas regarding the concept of agent on physical environments, especially applied to the control and coordination of autonomous systems: robots, mobile robots, industrial…

Social knowledge is one of the key aspects of MAS in order to face complex problems in dynamical environments. However, it is usually incorporated without specific support on behalf of the platform and that does not let agents take all…