Artificial Intelligence and Systems Theory: Applied to Cooperative Robots

This paper describes an approach to the design of a population of cooperative robots based on concepts borrowed from Systems Theory and Artificial Intelligence. The research has been developed under the SocRob project, carried out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Systems and Robotics - Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) in Lisbon. The acronym of the project stands both for "Society of Robots" and "Soccer Robots", the case study where we are testing our population of robots. Designing soccer robots is a very challenging problem, where the robots must act not only to shoot a ball towards the goal, but also to detect and avoid static (walls, stopped robots) and dynamic (moving robots) obstacles. Furthermore, they must cooperate to defeat an opposing team. Our past and current research in soccer robotics includes cooperative sensor fusion for world modeling, object recognition and tracking, robot navigation, multi-robot distributed task planning and coordination, including cooperative reinforcement learning in cooperative and adversarial environments, and behavior-based architectures for real time task execution of cooperating robot teams

Impact Assessment of European Structural Funds in Andalusia - a CGE Approach

In this work we carry out an impact analysis of the European Structural Funds (ESF) to the object of assessing their effect on the GDP, the level of prices or the consumers’ income on the region of Andalusia in the south of Spain. Accordingly, we present an Applied General Equilibrium Model (AGEM_A) and we compare the reception scenario of regional funds with a hypothetical situation where this financial support has been removed. The AGEM_A has been built by supplementing the statistical information provided by the Social Accounting Matrices for Andalusia corresponding to 1990, 1995 and 1999, with the data included in the three Community Support Frameworks (CSF) approved by the European Commission.