An artificial life approach for the animation of cognitive characters

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of cognitive character animation. We propose the use of finite state machines for the behavioral control of characters. Our approach rests on the idea that the cognitive character arises from the evolutionary computation embedded in the artificial life simulation, which in our case is implemented by the finite state machine. We present some of the results of the WOXBOT/ARENA research project. This project to build virtual worlds is aimed at the graphic simulation of an arena, where small mobile robots can perform requested tasks while behaving according to their own motivation and reasoning. Each robot is an intelligent agent that perceives the virtual environment through a simulated vision system and reacts by moving away from or approaching the object it sees. The conception and specification of the robots and environment are being done very carefully to create an open distributed object architecture that could serve as a test-bed freely available and ready to use for testing theories in some computational areas such as evolutionary computation, artificial life, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, cognitive neurosciences and distributed objects architectures. Furthermore, it is a first step towards building a cognitive animated character.