The books that have been written about "Lean Enterprise" would constitute an imposing library by themselves, but, a few very important aspects seem to have gone unexplored, and are "conspicuous by their absence" once the "journey towards Lean" has begun. To fill these gaps, Eric Matson is writing the "Schmidt-Creek Paddler's Guidebook Series" which will address these issues, and the first, "ASWO!" or "Ah, Shucks, We're Out!" examines the often naughty question of how to plan and manage inventories (of all sorts) in a "Lean-Enterprise" environment.

In recent years, robots have been built based on cognitive architecture which has been developed to model human cognitive ability. The cognitive architecture can be a basis for intelligence technology to generate robot intelligence. In this edited book the robot intelligence is classified into six categories: cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, behavioral intelligence, ambient intelligence, collective intelligence and genetic intelligence. This classification categorizes the intelligence of robots based on the different aspects of awareness and the ability to act deliberately as a...

We are facing a new technological challenge on how to store and retrieve knowledge and manipulate intelligence for autonomous services by intelligent systems which should be capable of carrying out real world tasks autonomously. To address this issue, robot researchers have been developing intelligence technology (InT) for "robots that think" which is in the focus of this book. The book covers all aspects of intelligence from perception at sensor level and reasoning at cognitive level to behavior planning at execution level for each low level segment of the machine. It also presents the...