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Welcome to the course on AI planning. Planning is one of the most important

aspects of intelligent behavior. The ability to identify and select

appropriate activity, and to project forward the consequences of executing

that activity, is fundamental to humans and intelligent robots alike.

The planning course lasts five weeks. In the first week of this course, we will

formally define the problem solved by planning algorithms and talk about the

context in which planning is used. After that in week two, we will describe

some basic AI techniques used for problem solving in general, and planning problems

in particular. This will leave you with a good

understanding of the STRIPS planning system.

In week three, we will look at different, a different approach to the same problem,

namely, plan space search. In addition, we will cover hierarchical

planning, which addresses a similar problem and has been used in many real

world applications. Week four gets us closer to the

state-of-the-art in planning research, introducing some of the techniques used

in the fastest planners available today. Finally, in week five, we will talk more

about application areas in which they AI planning has been used, and some more

advanced topics. The course is going to make use of

lectures on video, supplementary material on a wiki, and we'll give you some links

to some AI planners to try, along with relevant online resources, and some

recommended quite short readings. There'll be a number of quizzes and

online assessments to monitor your progress.

We're going to encourage you to use the course social platform, which includes

the discussion forums in the wiki. There's going to be a course Twitter tag

and there's also a virtual world meeting space for you to try.

Full details of all aspects of the social platform are on the course website.

We hope you will enjoy the course and will learn something useful.