Smarts are in the Architecture

Lessons Learned from Implemented Software Architectures for Physical Agents

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

A list of desiderata for an autonomous agent architecture includes decentralized, yet coherent coordination of behaviors, easy interface for a designer and end user, distinction of knowledge and skills, easily scalable, quantifiable measures of success in interaction in the real world and quantifiable learning metrics, ability to learn new knowledge and skills, and reliability. We present our architecture which aims to meet this list. Several instantiations including a Lego robot instance of our architecture is discussed in some detail. We will explore general questions in hope of working towards quantifiable parameters that guide architectural choices.