Programming Environments for Developing Real Time Autonomous Agents based on a Functional Module Network Model

In this paper, we present programming environments for developing real time autonomous agents on multi-processor systems based on a hardware independent description model. BeNet, our model is a network of functional modules that calculate elements of the internal representation of the brain with their own frequencies. A system that interacts with the physical world is modeled almost completely by a BeNet, because it consists of modules which interact with the external system at regular intervals. It is described much more easily than a common parallel program and its behavior is easy to understand. Since it is a parallel system and the description is not specific to any hardware, it is possible to realize environments for programming BeNets on various multi-processor systems. We implemented environments in which the developer can program a BeNet in a generic programming language such as C++ and test it immediately on a multi-processor system. In our environments, the developer only ne..