Lessons Learned from the Animate Agent Project (so far)

This paper gives a brief overview of the Animate Agent Project at the University of Chicago, describing skills, RAPs, and a recently added spatial planning module. The RAP system takes in symbolic goals and refines them into sequences of continuous skills that move the robot in real-time. The RAP system uses the spatial module as an assistant when spatial problems arise during goal refinement. As an example, the skills, RAPs, and spatial planning actions for a simple trash cleanup task are also briefly described. The paper finishes with answers to the seven symposium questions.