Empowering Agents within Virtual Environments

An agent’s embodiment within a virtual environment refers to its representation, and defines its capabilities, within the environment. This paper presents a system for the strong integration of embodiment with the agent’s deliberative mechanism. This mechanism is based upon the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) paradigm, and allows the agent to deliberate directly upon the location and animation of its embodiment. This fusion then provides the agent with the ability to freely mutate its embodied form to best suit the task at hand. At the same time, care must be taken to preserve the agents’ sense of self, so that users have a clear idea of who their agent is regardless of the embodiment that it has adopted. This paper outlines the system designed and developed to achieve this. This work forms part of the Agent Chameleons project, which aims to create agents that are free to migrate, mutate and evolve within and between various different environments and platforms. Keywords: Agent Chameleons, Embodiments, BDI