A Framework for Autonomous Agent interaction

Presented by

Ittai Balaban, Ofer Cohen

Instructed by Dr. Michael Elhadad

Dept. of Computer Science

Ben–Gurion University Of the Negev

What is the Matrix?

Introduction

• There exist many systems that implement world such as these.– MUDs– immersive virtual environments

• We built a toolkit for such worlds that generalizes these systems.

Our Model Provides for:

• Extensibility– An incremental world.– Adding components at run-time.– Components may grow during running the

system.

• Modularity– System architecture (i.e. decoupling of graphics

from framework)– Agents’ roles as reusable components.

Model Components

A logical unit in the world An Environment

An entity in the world An Agent

An entity’s context of interaction

Agent role

Agents & Roles

• Every agent has more than one role.

• In the agent’s lifetime more roles may be added.

• Interaction with an agent is role-dependant.

The Environment

• An agent container which provides certain services

• Services can be general…– Notifications and queries.

– These serve as an agent’s senses in relation to it’s world.

• … or specific– In our graphic application, we’ve added 3D-related

services.

The Framework

• Part I – Generic World Framework

• Part II– A 3 Dimensional Graphical Framework

Building an Agent = Creating a New Role

Part II

• The environment includes a graphical engine component (Java3D)

• Agents in this world can have visual representations.

Animation Language• We defined an animation-description-

language.

• Implemented using Java-3D.

• The language:– ADTs: Behavior, Event– Combination behaviors & events (i.e. Combining

2 behaviors sequentially to yield a new behavior.– Built-in building blocks: Basic behaviors, events.

Technologies

•Java

•Kawa Scheme

•Voyager ORB

•Java 3D

Deployment Scenario

VM 1

VM 2

VM 3

Voyager ORB

3D env n

3D env 1

env 1

env n

Voyager ORB

Voyager Client

Some Client

Program

3D Environment

Agent 1

Generic Services 3D Component

Agent 2

Agent 4

Agent 3

A Small World

• Blue floating balls

• The mentor – BlackBall

• Blue balls learn to interact from BlackBall (= Upgrade Agent?)

• : - )