It has been a long-standing goal of both the Artificial Intelligence and the Robotics communities to develop physical artifacts that can act intelligently . From the Robotics side, the priority has been on the development of mechanical agents that would exhibit navigation, manipulation, perception, and action skills, along with the ability to work cooperatively. The results on low-level control, including sensor uncertainty, limited reasoning about geometric and physical properties, and skills like object avoidance have proved interesting and useful, but most autonomous robotic agents still lack the ability to perform higher level intelligent operations either alone or in concert. This is partly because of their need to proceed with reasonable expedience, while the known methods are demonstrably very complex, and therefore slow. It is hoped that recent results in AI planning, learning, reasoning, and cooperation among agents will help in bridging the gap between high-level reasoning and low-level physical execution. The purpose of this workshop is to examine the available results and research agenda in this `bridging` area, while also establishing international links between American and Brazilian researchers working in the same areas and between NSF and its Brazilian counterpart organization CNPq, which will provide support for the Brazilian participants.
