This issue of Autonomous Robots features several papers on artificial intelligence issues, concerned primarily with planning and reasoning. Some readers may object to the inclusion of such material, as not being close enough to our major objective of publishing papers which lead from theory to the implementation of actual robots whenever possible. While that is still our major objective, we also believe that AI issues are central to question of robot autonomy. In many ways, the development of "intelligent robotics" is closely coupled to the development of artificial intelligence, from the early experiments with "Shakey" at Stanford University to the current robot contests at conferences such as IJCAI or the AAAI meetings in the USA.
In recent years there has been a move to emphasize the concept of agents in the AI field, "Intelligent agents", or simply "agents" are software and/or hardware systems which obtain input information from the environment (as units of perception or "percepts"), perform a variety of cognitive tasks with this information, and produce some form of action as outputs. Clearly, in many AI problems dealing with problem solving or planning or learning, the agents will be only software structures.