- Autonomous planning and scheduling:
A hundred million miles from Earth, NASA’s Remote Agent program became the first on-board autonomous planning program to control the scheduling of operations for a spacecraft (Jonsson et al., 2000). Remote Agent generated plans from high-level goals specified from the ground, and it monitored the
operation of the spacecraft as the plans were executed-detecting, diagnosing, and recovering from problems as they occurred.
IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer program to defeat the world champion in a chess match when it bested Garry Kasparov by a score of 3.5 to 2.5 in an exhibition match (Goodman and Keene, 1997).
The ALVINN computer vision system was trained to steer a car to keep it following a lane. It was placed in CMU’s NAVLAB computer-controlled minivan and used to navigate across the United States-for 2850 miles it was in control of steering the vehicle 98% of the time.
Medical diagnosis programs based on probabilistic analysis have been able to perform at the level of an expert physician in several areas of medicine.
During the Persian Gulf crisis of 1991, U.S. forces deployed a Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, DART (Cross and Walker, 1994), to do automated logistics planning and scheduling for transportation. This involved up to 50,000 vehicles, cargo, and people at a time, and had to account for starting points, destinations, routes, and conflict resolution among all parameters. The AI planning techniques
allowed a plan to be generated in hours that would have taken weeks with older methods. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) stated that this single application more than paid back DARPA’s 30-year investment in AI.
Many surgeons now use robot assistants in microsurgery. HipNav (DiGioia et al., 1996) is a system that uses computer vision techniques to create a threedimensional model of a patient’s internal anatomy and then uses robotic control to guide the insertion of a hip replacement prosthesis.
- Language understanding and problem solving:
PROVERB (Littman et al., 1999) is a computer program that solves crossword puzzles better than most humans, using constraints on possible word fillers, a large database of past puzzles, and a variety of information sources including dictionaries and online databases such as a list of movies and the actors that appear in them.
