My second proposal is a project based on the “double-tower.doc

Teleo-Reactive Programs and the Triple-Tower Architecture Nils J. Nilsson Robotics Laboratory Department of Computer Science Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 nilsson@ October 5, 2001 ABSTRACT I describe an architecture for linking perception and action in a robot. It consists of three “towers” of layered components. The “perception tower” contains rules that create increasingly abstract descriptions of the current environmental situation starting with the primitive predicates produced by the robot’s sensory apparatus. These descriptions are deposited in a “model tower” which is continuously kept faithful to the current environmental situation by a “truth-maintenance” system. The predicates in the model tower, in turn, evoke appropriate action-producing programs in the “action tower.” It is proposed that the actions be written as “teleo-reactive” programsones that react dynamically to changing situations in ways that lead inexorably toward their goals. Programs in the action tower are organized more-or-less hierarchicallybottoming out in programs that cause the robot to take primitive actions in its environment. The effects of the actions are sensed by the robot’s sensory mechanism, completing a sense-model-act cycle that is quiescent only at those times when the robot’s goal is perceived to be satisfied. I illustrate the operation of the architecture using a simple block-stacking task. I. Agent Architectures Can anything in general be said about intelligent agent architectures? Just as there are millions of species of animals, occupying millions of different niches, I expect that there will be many species of artificial agentseach a specialist for one of a countless number of tasks. The exact forms of their architectures will depend on their tasks and their environments. For example, some will work in time-stressed situations in which reactions to unpredictable and changing environmental states must be fast and unequivocal. Others will have the time