Can you imagine a useful task you would like a social robot to perform for you? This paper presents an Internet survey where participants were asked this question to identify applications for social robots. The applications mentioned by the participants…

Autonomous navigation is one of the most essential capabilities of autonomous robots. In order to navigate autonomously, robots need to detect obstacles. While many approaches achieve good results tackling this problem with lidar sensor devices, vision based approaches are cheaper…

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…

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…

This paper presents a multiagent recommendation system (RecMAS) able to coordinate the interactions between a user agent (AgUser) and a set of commercial agents (AgComs). It provides a useful service for monitoring changes in the AgUser’s beliefs and decisions based…

Open societies are situated in dynamic environments and are formed by heterogeneous autonomous agents. In order to ensure social order, norms have been employed as coordination mechanisms. However, the dynamical features of open systems may cause that norms loose their…

In real-time Multi-Agent Systems, Real-Time Agents merge intelligent deliberative techniques with real-time reactive actions in a distributed environment. CBR has been successfully applied in Multi-Agent Systems as deliberative mechanism for agents. However, in the case of Real-Time Multi-Agent Systems the…

This paper presents a brief summary of the post-proceedings of the special session on practical applications held in the framework of IWANN 2009. The special session was supported by the THOMAS (TIN2006-14630-C03-03) project and aims at presenting the results obtained…