Rather than using traditional artificial intelligence techniques, which are ineffective when applied to the complexities of real-world robot navigaiton, Connell describes a methodology of reconstructing intelligent robots with distributed, multiagent control systems. After presenting this methodology, hte author describes a complex, robust, and successful application-a mobile robot "can collection machine" which operates in an unmodified offifce environment occupied by moving people.

Building a robot that learns to perform a task has been acknowledged as one of the major challenges facing artificial intelligence. Self-improving robots would relieve humans from much of the drudgery of programming and would potentially allow operation in environments that were changeable or only partially known. Progress towards this goal would also make fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence by furthering our understanding of how to successfully integrate disparate abilities such as perception, planning, learning and action.
Although its roots can be traced back to the...

Starting with fingerprints more than a hundred years ago, there has been ongoing research in biometrics. Within the last forty years face and speaker recognition have emerged as research topics. However, as recently as a decade ago, biometrics itself did not exist as an independent field. Each of the biometric-related topics grew out of different disciplines. For example, the study of fingerprints came from forensics and pattern recognition, speaker recognition evolved from signal processing, the beginnings of face recognition were in computer vision, and privacy concerns arose from the...