Embodied Agents Research Articles

A unified formal description of behavioural and deliberative robotic multi-agent systems

Many behavioural (Arkin, 1998) and deliberative (Russell and Norvig, 1995) robot control methods have been developed. Besides investigating task execution by a single robot multi-agent systems are being developed. Unfortunately only some of those control methods have a formal description. To aggravate the situation, those control methods that have formal specifications use different formal means of description. This paper presents an outline of a unified formal description of systems composed of many embodied agents using behavioural or deliberative control methods. Such a description is needed to specify in an implementation independent way the functionality of programming frameworks (Markiewicz and Lucena, 2001). Transition function based approach to the formal description of the above mentioned systems has been assumed to facilitate the future implementation of thus specified programming frameworks. The presented description is a generalization of the formal description used for the specification of MRROC++ (Zieliński, 1999; Zieliński, 2001).

Multimodal embodied agents

1 Believable interactive embodied agentsAmong the goals of research on autonomous agents one important aim is to build believable interactive embodied agents that are apt to application to friendly interfaces in e-commerce, tourist and service query systems, entertainment (e.g. synthetic actors) and education (pedagogical agents, agents for help and instruction to the hearing impaired).

AAAI 2000 Fall Symposium Series Reports

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2000 Fall Symposium Series was held on Friday through Sunday, 3 to 5 November, at the Sea Crest Oceanfront Conference Center. The titles of the five symposia were (1) Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications, (2) Learning How to Do Things, (3) Parallel Cognition for Embodied Agents, (4) Simulating Human Agents, and (5) Socially Intelligent Agents: The Human in the Loop.

Polymers as a Platform for Drug Delivery: Reviewing our Current Portfolio on Poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) Microspheres

The chemical conjugation or the physical embodiment of therapeutic agents in polymers offers great potential to improve the efficacy and safety of therapies and create novel therapeutic opportunities. This has led to numerous concepts regarding the formulation, the delivery and the targeting of therapeutics. Our current research portfolio in this field includes several projects. In all of them poly(lactide-co-glycolide), PLGA, varying in molecular weight and end-group modification, is used as a delivery platform. In this review we will firstly outline our concept of single-injection vaccines. Instead of the application of repeated booster doses, such vaccines are designed to deliver the antigen in a pulsed or sustained fashion, in such a way that protective humoral and cellular immunity can be achieved after a single injection. In the second polymer-based project we aim at the administration of insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I), which bears great potential in tissue engineering, e.g. to enhance bone healing. Here we summarize on a PLGA microsphere system for the localized and controlled delivery of IGF-I in order to close bone defects after fracture, pathology or surgery. In a third project we use this polymeric platform for the design of antigen-encoding DNA vaccines designed to preferentially target the most potent antigen presenting cells, i.e. the dendritic cells. Two prime objectives are currently being studied, i) enhancement of phagocytosis of DNA-loaded PLGA microspheres by human-derived dendritic cells, and ii) release of intact plasmid DNA and concomitant transfection of dendritic cells once the PLGA microspheres were successfully phagocytosed.

Is the Self a Kind of Understanding?

We present a developmental, relational perspective on the self as a kind of reflective, interpretive understanding. Such self understanding always is embedded and emergent within the historical, sociocultural life-world, and serves to disclose and extend the being of particular embodied agents. Following an introduction that links our work to related traditions of scholarly writing on the self, our essay is organized in four parts. The first of these provides a very brief conceptual clarification of the relationships we assume between self and other aspects of personhood. The second offers a broad, developmental framework for the emergence of self as the kind of understanding we envision. The third elaborates the kind of understanding that constitutes the self, especially in terms of the care manifested by human agents in the life-world. In the final section of the essay, critical consideration is given to the viability, coherence, and potential fruitfulness of our attempt to consider self as a kind of understanding.

Behavioral Coordination, Structural Congruence and Entrainment in a Simulation of Acoustically Coupled Agents

Social coordination is studied in a simulated model of autonomous embodied agents that interact acoustically. Theoretical concepts concerning social behavior are presented from a systemic per spective and their usefulness is evaluated in interpreting the results obtained. Two agents moving in an unstructured arena must locate each other, and remain within a short distance of one anoth er for as long as possible using noisy continuous acoustic interaction. Evolved dynamical recurrent neural networks are used as the control architecture. Acoustic coupling poses nontrivial problems like discriminating 'self' from 'non-self' and structuring production of signals in time so as to minimize interference. Detailed observation of the most frequently evolved behavioral strategy shows that interacting agents perform rhythmic signals leading to the coordination of movement. During coordination, signals become entrained in an anti-phase mode that resembles turn-taking. Perturbation techniques show that signalling behavior not only performs an external function, but it is also integrated into the movement of the producing agent, thus showing the difficulty of separating behavior into social and non-social classes. Structural congruence between agents is shown by exploring internal dynamics as well as the response of single agents in the presence of signalling beacons that reproduce the signal patterns of the interacting agents. Lack of entrainment with the signals produced by the beacons shows the importance of transient periods of mutual dynamic perturbation wherein agents achieve congruence.