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In week one we give an overview of planning and the approach taken in this course. We set AI planning in the context of task setting, plan execution and communication with people using plans. We list some of the very wide range of research areas being explored in the field of AI planning.

We also encourage you to start to use the course social platform including the discussion forums, the course wiki (which will continue to be built up beyond the end of the course as a continuing repository of useful information to assist you), share useful information via twitter with hash tag #aiplan, and to get a Second Life virtual world avatar and try the (experimental) virtual world meeting spaces to see if they are useful to course participants.

"Planning is the process of generating (possibly partial) representations of future behaviour prior to the use of such plans to constrain or control that behavior. The outcome is usually a set of actions, with temporal and other constraints on them, for execution by some agent or agents. As a core aspect of human intelligence, planning has been studied since the earliest days of AI and cognitive science. Planning research has led to many useful tools for real-world applications, and has yielded significant insights into the organization of behavior and the nature of reasoning about actions."

Austin Tate on 'Planning' in 'The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences' (MITECS), 1999. Edited by Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. ISBN 0-262-73144-4. Page 652-3. http://ai.ato.ms/MITECS/Entry/tate.html

Initial Course Survey

If you have not already done so, please complete the short course survey.

This Week's Video Lectures

This week's lectures are accessible via the Video Lectures link in the left hand navigation bar for the course web pages and comprises two set of videos numbered 1.1 to 1.4 and 1.5 to 1.8.

For those wanting to follow the Awareness Level of the course you should watch the nominated video lectures marked with ♦ plus the "feature" video described below. You can watch them at any time during the whole course, and need not view them all at once this week.

Gerhard Wickler, Austin Tate and Freddy-II at NMS

This Week's Feature

AI Planning for Robots
  • See location footage of robots which have used AI planners.
  • Shakey the Robot, SRI International, 1969
  • Freddy-II Hand-Eye Robot, Department of AI, University of Edinburgh, 1973
  • Modern Research Robot Arm, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 2012
  • Aldebaran Nau Humanoid Robots, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 2012
  • NASA Deep Space One Spacecraft, 1998-2001

    The weekly "feature" videos are required viewing for the Awareness Level of the course.

    This Week's Additional Stuff

    For Week 1 Lectures

    For Lecture 1.6 Planning in Context - Multiagent Systems

    For Lecture 1.7 Planning in Context - Practical Planners

    For Feature: AI Planning for Robots

    This Week's Acronyms

    PDDL = Planning Domain Definition Language

    COA = Course of Action. A military term for a plan. Usually selected from amongst the various options developed.

    Recommended Course Reading

    The course generally will not have a lot of required reading, but we feel you may find that your understanding is improved if you read a number of short papers about AI planners and some reviews which may give a different viewpoint on the material covered in the course. Full details of the readings along with links to on-line PDF copies is on the Course Wiki Reading Page. Please take a look at these papers over the next few weeks and raise things of interest to you in the Discussion Forums. For this first week, try to read the following two papers:

    Review of AI Planners to 1990

    Hendler, J.A., Tate, A. and Drummond, M. (1990) “AI Planning: Systems and Techniques”, AI Magazine Vol. 11, No. 2, pp.61-77, Summer 1990, AAAI Press. http://aaaipress.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/download/833/751

    O-Plan Paper

    Tate, A. and Dalton, J. (2003) “O-Plan: a Common Lisp Planning Web Service”, invited paper, in Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference 2003, October 12-25, 2003, New York, NY, USA, October 12-15, 2003. (4 pages) http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2003/2003-luc-tate-oplan-web.pdf

    If you are not familiar with simple tree search algorithms, such as breadth-first and depth-first search, you may want to have a look at chapter 3 in the Russell and Norvig AI text book. If you do not have access to this book, there are many descriptions of these on the web, including on Wikipedia.

    Created Thu 23 Aug 2012 5:30 PM CEST
    Last Modified Fri 23 Jan 2015 11:23 AM CET