What Your Body and Your Living Room Tell My Agent

This paper proposes a class of software agent architectures capable of playing some of the beneficial roles embodiment accomplishes in living beings. These architectures provide the means for the soft-visual appearance required for non-verbal communication and for learning through imitation. The architecture includes mechanisms that play the role of the body as an inner source of motives, enable the agent to have feelings and emotions, and allow the agent to centrifugally construct itself, avoiding non-grounded meta-control processes. They allow the efficient execution of agent functions in parallel; and they provide sensory-motor coordination processes, information filtering and attention mechanisms. Finally the proposed class of architectures integrate several algorithms used for learning through imitation, learning through direct manipulation of objects, and learning correlations among and computational complexity of the several aspects of the task and the environment. The paper discusses adequate success tests and experimental procedures for the proposed class of architectures. 1