Characterizing an Architecture for Intelligent, Reactive Agents

Lessons Learned from Implemented Software Architectures for Physical Agents

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

In this paper we briefly describe a software architecture that integrates reactivity and dehberation. The architecture has three levels, or tiers. The bottom tier contains a set of situated, reactive skills. The second tier is a sequencer that can activate sets of skills to perform a task. The third tier is a planner that reasons in-depth about goals, resources and constraints. We characterize this architecture across several dimensions and then describe the lessons that we have learned from applying this architecture to several robotics projects.