Autonomous Agents / Autonome agenter

In this context an autonomous agent is a computer controlled character interacting with a user, or other agents, in a virtual world. In conjunction with the STAGING and PUPPET projects autonomous agents are used as virtual actors in a virtual reality environment. CVMT conducts research in architectures for such autonomous agents with the aim of providing an illusion of life that appears to be sensing and rationally reacting beings. The agents are developed to interface to CVMT's Virtual Reality platform. The effort concerning agents has been made in three main areas: 1) mechanisms for agent action selection based on events in the virtual world (e.g., the user's actions), 2) agent perception, i.e. how the agent gathers and accumulates knowledge of the state of the virtual world (e.g. simulated vision sense combined with a maintained spatial memory), and 3) how the agent can perform efficient and intelligent movement planning in a dynamic scenario. Project under STAGING (Danish Research Councils) and PUPPET (ESPRIT). (Claus B. Madsen, Rasmus Agerholm, Erik Granum)