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In order to clear the world of the threat posed by landmines and other explosive devices, robotic systems can play an important role. However, the development of such field robots that need to operate in hazardous conditions requires the careful consideration of multiple aspects related to the perception, mobility, and collaboration capabilities of the system. In the framework of a European challenge, the Artificial Intelligence for Detection of Explosive Devices - eXtended (AIDEDeX) project proposes to design a heterogeneous multi-robot system with advanced sensor fusion algorithms. This system is specifically designed to detect and classify improvised explosive devices, explosive ordnances, and landmines. This project integrates specialised sensors, including electromagnetic induction, ground penetrating radar, X-Ray backscatter imaging, Raman spectrometers, and multimodal cameras, to achieve comprehensive threat identification and localisation. The proposed system comprises a fleet of unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles. This article details the operational phases of the AIDEDeX system, from rapid terrain exploration using unmanned aerial vehicles to specialised detection and classification by unmanned ground vehicles equipped with a robotic manipulator. Initially focusing on a centralised approach, the project will also explore the potential of a decentralised control architecture, taking inspiration from swarm robotics to provide a robust, adaptable, and scalable solution for explosive detection.

Qualification has been recently introduced as a generalization of uncertainty in the field of Logic Programming. In this report we investigate a more expressive language for First-Order Functional Logic Programming with Constraints and Qualification. We present a Rewriting Logic which characterizes the intended semantics of programs, and a prototype implementation based on a semantically correct program transformation. Potential applications of the resulting language include flexible information retrieval. As a concrete illustration, we show how to write program rules to compute qualified answers for user queries concerning the books available in a given library., Comment: 36 pages, 5 figures, extended version with full proofs of Qualified Computations in Functional Logic Programming, in P.M. Hill and D.S. Warren (Eds.), ICLP 2009, LNCS 5649, pp. 449-463, 2009

Uncertainty in logic programming has been widely investigated in the last decades, leading to multiple extensions of the classical LP paradigm. However, few of these are designed as extensions of the well-established and powerful CLP scheme for Constraint Logic Programming. In a previous work we have proposed the SQCLP (proximity-based qualified constraint logic programming) scheme as a quite expressive extension of CLP with support for qualification values and proximity relations as generalizations of uncertainty values and similarity relations, respectively. In this paper we provide a transformation technique for transforming SQCLP programs and goals into semantically equivalent CLP programs and goals, and a practical Prolog-based implementation of some particularly useful instances of the SQCLP scheme. We also illustrate, by showing some simple-and working-examples, how the prototype can be effectively used as a tool for solving problems where qualification values and proximity relations play a key role. Intended use of SQCLP includes flexible information retrieval applications., Comment: 49 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, preliminary version of an article of the same title, published as Technical Report SIC-4-10, Universidad Complutense, Departamento de Sistemas Inform\'aticos y Computaci\'on, Madrid, Spain

Similarity-based Logic Programming (briefly, SLP ) has been proposed to enhance the LP paradigm with a kind of approximate reasoning which supports flexible information retrieval applications. This approach uses a fuzzy similarity relation R between symbols in the program's signature, while keeping the syntax for program clauses as in classical LP. Another recent proposal is the QLP(D) scheme for Qualified Logic Programming, an extension of the LP paradigm which supports approximate reasoning and more. This approach uses annotated program clauses and a parametrically given domain D whose elements qualify logical assertions by measuring their closeness to various users' expectations. In this paper we propose a more expressive scheme SQLP(R,D) which subsumes both SLP and QLP(D) as particular cases. We also show that SQLP(R,D) programs can be transformed into semantically equivalent QLP(D) programs. As a consequence, existing QLP(D) implementations can be used to give efficient support for similarity-based reasoning., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, revised edition of Similarity-based Reasoning in Qualified Logic Programming, in PPDP '08: Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGPLAN conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming. ACM, Valencia, Spain, 185-194. 2008

We use data mining techniques for finding 82 previously unreported common proper motion pairs from the PPM-Extended catalogue. Special-purpose software automating the different phases of the process has been developed. The software simplifies the detection of the new pairs by integrating a set of basic operations over catalogues. The operations can be combined by the user in scripts representing different filtering criteria. This procedure facilitates testing the software and employing the same scripts for different projects.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 19th Workshop on Logic- based methods in Programming Environments (WLPE'09), which was held in Pasadena, USA, on July 14th, 2009. WLPE aims at providing an informal meeting for researchers working on logic-based methods and tools which support program development and analy- sis. This year, we have continued and consolidated the shift in focus from en- vironmental tools for logic programming to logic-based environmental tools for programming in general, so that this workshop can be possibly interesting for a wider scientific community. All the papers submitted to WLPE'09 have gone through a careful process of peer reviewing, with at least three reviews for each paper and a subsequent in-depth discussion in the Program Committee., Comment: Html page including the links to the papers presented at the Workshop. The papers are already in CoRR