I Have a Robot, and I'm Not Afraid to Use It!

66 AI MAGAZINE Robots, and therefore roboticists, have been a part of the agents community from its auspicious beginnings in the Autonomous Agents series of conferences, and continuing with the merger into the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) conferences. Today, there is a resurgent interest and recognition of the importance of robotics research framed within areas of research familiar to autonomous agents and multiagent systems researchers. Robots (and roboticists) increasingly appear at the AAMAS conferences, and for a good reason. The AAMAS community is investing efforts to encourage robotics research within itself. An annual robotics special track, an associated robotics workshop (Autonomous Robots and Multirobot Systems), and a series of exciting AAMAS-sponsored plenary speakers and awards over a number of years are drawing roboticists in. The number of robotics papers is increasing. There are fruitful interactions with the other communities within AAMAS, such as virtual agents, game theory, and machine learning. Robots are being used both to inspire AAMAS research as well as to conduct it. I posit that the growing success of robotics at AAMAS is due not only to the nurturing efforts of the AAMAS community, but mainly to the increasing recognition of an important, deeper, truth: robots are agents. In other words, there is growing recognition that it is scientifically useful to roboticists and agenticists (agent researchers) in other AAMAS areas to think of robots as agents.