What's New @ Intelligent Robotics lab

These are recent changes. See the Intelligent Robotics lab home page for a more complete description of our work, in several areas. See Highlights for key papers over the years.


Emily Sheetz, et al, IROS-2024 paper


The Herbert A. Simon Prize


Professor Emeritus Benjamin Kuipers


CACM Viewpoint on Ethics, Trust, and Cooperation


Foster, Johnson, and Kuipers at ICRA-23


Ben's paper on Trust and Cooperation


Round-Table Discussion on AV Ethics


Jon Juett's PhD Thesis


Ben's chapter on Ethics of AI


Jon and Ben's paper in Frontiers in Neurorobotics


Jon and Ben's paper at IROS


Ben's paper on ethics in CACM


Collin's paper in AIES-18


Collin Johnson's PhD Thesis


Two AI Magazine articles


Michigan-Tufts Intelligent Wheelchair Integration


Jong Jin's and Seungwon's paper at ICRA-17


Ben's plenary at RoboPhilosophy 2016


Jon Juett's paper in Humanoids 2016


Two videos on Vulcan, the Intelligent Wheelchair


Initial papers on morality and ethics for robots


Jong Jin Park's PhD thesis


Jong Jin Park's paper at IROS-15


Grace Tsai's PhD thesis


Grace Tsai's paper at IROS-14


Grace and Collin's paper at Vision Meets Cognition Workshop (CVPR-14)


Roni Mittelman's paper in Frontiers in Psychology, 2014


Roni Mittelman's paper at ICML-14


Grace Tsai's paper at BMVC-13


Roni Mittelman's paper at NAACL HLT-13


Roni Mittelman's paper at CVPR-13


New papers at ICRA-13


Xu, Liu and Kuipers at ECCV-12


Three new papers in IROS-2012


Ben's paper on corporations as intelligent agents


Changhai Xu PhD dissertation at UT Austin


Shilpa Gulati PhD dissertation at UT Austin


Indoor Scene Understanding paper to ICCV


Jonathan Mugan's journal article on QLAP


Jeremy Stober's paper in ICDL/EpiRob-11


Jingen Liu's papers in CVPR-11


Changhai Xu's papers in CRV-11


Jong Jin Park's paper in ICRA-11


Overview of the Object Semantic Hierarchy


Jonathan Mugan's PhD thesis


Hybrid Spatial Semantic Hierarchy, IJRR, 2010


Recent papers by Jonathan Mugan and Jeremy Stober


Changhai Xu's papers on OSH


Aniket Murarka's PhD thesis


Gulati and Murarka papers at IROS-09


Jonathan Mugan's IJCAI paper


Joseph Modayil's journal article on his Ph.D. dissertation


Journal version of the consciousness discussion

Parts of this appeared previously in AAAI-05 and in the AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium.


Patrick Beeson PhD thesis


SSH Intellectual History chapter


Murarka, Sridharan & Kuipers paper at IROS 2008


Stober & Kuipers paper at ICDL 2008


Mugan & Kuipers papers at QR 2008 and EpiRob 2008


Xu, Lee & Kuipers paper at CRV 2008


Two papers at ICRA 2008


Mugan and Provost papers at EpiRob 2007


Kuipers, AAAI Fall Symposium Series, 2007


Mugan and Kuipers, ICDL, 2007


Jefferson Provost PhD thesis


Joseph Modayil PhD thesis


Subramanian Ramamoorthy PhD thesis


Matthew MacMahon PhD thesis


Modayil and Kuipers on Learning Objects, in AAAI-07


Action learning paper at AAAI Spring Symposium on Control Mechanisms


KR/HRI paper at AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Assistants


Essays on Defeating Terrorism

(11-9-06) Several essays originally posted on my web site have been published in a journal.


Skeletonization code available

(10-18-06) The source code for EVG-Thin, Patrick Beeson's C++ implementation of a thinning approximation to his Extended Voronoi Graph.

Matt MacMahon's AAAI-06 paper

(5-3-06) Congratulations to Matt MacMahon and Brian Stankiewicz for a new paper on Matt's thesis research in AAAI-06.

Aniket Murarka's CRV-06 paper

(5-3-06) Congratulations to Aniket Murarka and Joseph Modayil for their new paper in CRV-06.

(6-8-06) Best Student Paper Award at CRV-06!


CQ source code available

(3-9-06) The source code for CQ, Dan Dvorak's C++ implementation of the core constraint filtering algorithm in QSIM, is now available on the web.

ICRA-06 papers

(1-27-06) Congratulations to the authors of the two papers from our group accepted to ICRA-06.


Connection Science special issue on Developmental Robotics

(1-27-06) We have two papers in this special issue!

Consciousness paper at AAAI-05

Recently (8-19-05) updated with a revised and expanded version.


Francesco Savelli's PhD thesis


Harold Chaput's PhD thesis


Bootstrap learning overview at AAAI Spring Symposium on Developmental Robotics


Zmail anti-spam paper accepted to ASDN-2005


Papers accepted to ICRA-2005


Papers accepted to IROS-04 and QR-04

(6-3-04) We have three papers accepted to IROS-04 and one to QR-04..

Kuipers, Modayil, Beeson, MacMahon and Savelli paper in ICRA-04.

(3-1-04) This is an extensive revision of the RUR-03 paper, and describes the hybrid SSH using small-scale metrical maps and large-scale topological maps.

Beeson, MacMahon, Modayil, Provost, Savelli and Kuipers paper in RUR-03

(5-23-03) This paper describes our new hybrid between small-scale and large-scale space representations.

Remolina and Kuipers paper published in AIJ

(1-6-04) The paper has actually appeared on the Elsevier web site. The printed version should arrive soon.

(5-21-03) The journal version of Emilio Remolina's PhD thesis has been accepted to the Artificial Intelligence Journal. This is the current definitive description of the causal and topological map representations in the SSH.


More Oldies But Goodies

(3-3-03) Thanks to our new copier that will email .pdf files, we now have online copies of some older papers that weren't available before, but are still well worth reading.

Algernon in Java

(2-3-03) There is a new implementation of Algernon: Algernon in Java.

It was created by Mike Hewett in the Bioinformatics group in the Stanford Genetics Department.


Ramamoorthy and Kuipers, HSCC-03

(1-19-03) This paper, following on Kuipers & Ramamoorthy, HSCC-02, demonstrates Qualitative Heterogeneous Control (QHC) on a higher order system through the detailed example of the cart-pole system.


The Skeleton in the Cognitive Map

(11-15-02) This paper, which is both a step towards cognitive models higher-level knowledge and the result of a nice collaboration between AI and Psychology researchers, is now in press in the journal Environment and Behavior.


Kay and Ungar (2000) now available

(11-1-02) The following two papers now have .pdf files available of their published journal versions. The Kay and Ungar (2000) paper was previously not available online at all.


Kuipers and Beeson, AAAI-2002

(4-8-02) This shows how to learn to recognize places, given sensory images, in the SSH framework, with very weak knowledge of the nature of the sensors.


Logical Theory of the SSH Causal and Topological Maps

(4-6-02) This paper is the journal-sized version of Emilio's PhD thesis. It is the reference definition of the logic-based portions of the Spatial Semantic Hierarchy.


Heterogeneous Control of the Pendulum

(1-15-02) This paper demonstrates how to create a global controller for pumping up and balancing a pendulum, by composing a set of simple, qualitatively described local controllers. The result can be proved correct using QSIM and temporal logic.


AAAI Spring Symposium Papers

(10-1-01) A little late (sorry), but here are the papers that were presented at the AAAI Spring Symposium Series.

Kuipers & Beeson, Fall Symposium Series


Remolina & Kuipers, IJCAI-01

(8-18-01) This is the core of Emilio's dissertation.

Encyclopedia article on Qualitative Simulation

(6-1-2001) The following encyclopedia article provides a compact introduction to the current state of qualitative simulation.


The Skeleton in the Cognitive Map

(3-2-2001) A paper proposing a computational hypothesis for an abstraction mechanism observed in humans.

Bert Kay's paper on MSQUID appears

(1-30-2001) This is the definitive journal article describing MSQUID, and is the third of three journal articles from Bert's dissertation. Unfortunately, there is no online version yet.

Changed from .ps.Z to .ps.gz

(6-20-2000) To allow faster and more reliable retrieval, file compression of PostScript files has been changed from Unix compress (.ps.Z) to Gnu gzip (.ps.gz).

Let me know (kuipers@cs.utexas.edu) if there's a problem.


The Spatial Semantic Hierarchy in AIJ

(3-12-2000) A full-length description of the SSH representation for knowledge of large-scale space.

SQUID paper in AIJ

This is one of three journal articles coming out of Bert's dissertation.

The Spatial Semantic Hierarchy

A full-length description of the SSH representation for knowledge of large-scale space. (Extensively updated from the 3-30-99 version.) [Superceded by AIJ, 2000 publication.]

QSIM-papers updated

(9-30-99) The qsim-papers.ps document has been brought up to date.

Our online bibliography is a better source.


New Technical Reports on Semi-Quantitative Reasoning

(4-15-99)

Rinner and Kuipers IJCAI-99 paper


The Intelligent Wheelchair


Remolina and Kuipers AAAI Fall Symposium paper


Ben Kuipers' PhD Thesis Available (again)

(11-2-98) After 21 years, I have made my PhD thesis (MIT-AI TR-418) available again. I have resisted all temptation to correct or update the content while converting to LaTeX. Believe it or not, there is still a lot of good stuff here that has not been published elsewhere. There has also been subsequent progress, of course. Enjoy!

Bert Kay's Journal Article on SQSIM

(7-22-98) Bert Kay's journal article has just been accepted by Computers and Chemical Engineering. This is the definitive journal article describing SQSIM.


QSIM-papers updated

(6-12-98) The qsim-papers.ps document has been brought up to date.

Our online bibliography is a better source.


AAAI-98 papers: QR and Robotics

(6-9-98)

Logical Semantics of the SSH

(12-11-97) Emilio Remolina will be presenting our paper at the Common Sense 98 symposium in London.

Dan Clancy Passes His Final Dissertation Defense

(11-25-97) I am very happy to announce that soon-to-be-Dr. Daniel Clancy has passed his dissertation defense, and should receive his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in December 1997.

(1-8-98)


Fruitful Problems in Qualitative Reasoning

(11-25-97) I have added a new page of research problems.

These are problems in qualitative reasoning that I consider to be particularly fruitful right now, in the sense of being both accessible and important. A good solution to any of these problems will not only be valuable in its own right, but will enable substantial further work by the researcher and by others.

I encourage anyone in the QR community to take these on. I will be happy to give email advice when I can.

Ben Kuipers


Berleant and Kuipers on Q3 in AIJ

This important paper, based on Berleant's 1991 doctoral dissertation, shows that semi-quantitative simulation converges to numerically precise behaviors as uncertainty decreases and more effort is applied.


New Journal Article: Rickel and Porter, AIJ, 1997.

This is an outstanding demonstration of how to use and control compositional modeling (QPC) and qualitative simulation (QSIM) to answer questions from a large domain-specific knowledge base.

More detail under the Multi-Function Knowledge Base Research Group home page.



Tragic Loss

Bert Kay was mugged and killed in Palo Alto on Thursday, June 12, 1997.

He was 38 years old, and leaves his wife Meg and two-year-old twin daughters, Sonia and Nina.

There was a memorial service on Tuesday, June 17, at Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, California. Several Austin-area memorials were held the following week.

Bert's web page will be extended with further information about his life and work.



New Conference Papers: AAAI-97 and QR-97


Old (But Good) Papers Added to Web Page.


New reviews of the QR Book.

See the QR book page for other reviews.

Bert Kay doctoral dissertation on SQSIM and SQUID

(11-18-96) Bert Kay has completed an outstanding doctoral dissertation on semi-quantitative simulation (SQSIM) and semi-quantitative system identification (SQUID).

Shults & Kuipers paper in AIJ

(11-7-96) The AIJ will soon publish a paper describing our work on proving statements in temporal logic by model-checking against the behavior graph predicted by QSIM. This paper has now appeared in print.


Pierce & Kuipers paper in AIJ

(11-7-96) The AIJ will soon publish a paper describing David Pierce's dissertation research on how a robot starting with uninterpreted sensors and effectors can learn to understand both its own sensorimotor capabilities and its environment. This paper has now appeared in print.


Spatial Semantic Hierarchy for a Physical Mobile Robot

(10-17-96) Wan Yik Lee has finished his long-awaited dissertation on implementing the SSH on a physical robot, our RWI B12, named Spot.

New Conference Papers: QR-96, TIME-96, and AAAI-96


Old (But Good) Papers Added to Web Page.


SQsim: Major Progress in Semi-Quantitative Reasoning


Robot Learning with Uninterpreted Sensors and Effectors


See our Post-Doctoral Fellow Ad!


Temporal Logic, and Related QSIM Formalization


Reviews of the QR Book


QSIM in Parallel Hardware


Old (But Good) Papers Added to Web Page.


R++, based on Algernon, developed by AT+T Bell Labs.


Five New and Old PhD Dissertations Now Available


The QR Book!

The QR book is available, and is the best reference (sometimes the only reference) for many things related to QSIM. See:


New WWW Pages and Files


Recent Papers (1994)


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