Distributed Cognition through Active Mental Entities: an Argumentation-Based Approach1

This paper introduces the active mental entities approach to the design of intelligent autonomous agents. In this approach, mental attitudes are conceived as active computational entities and the overall mental activity of an agent results from their independent operation and interaction. In order to provide a formal support to this approach, we propose argumentation theory as a basis for the definition of interaction mechanisms among active mental entities. To this purpose, a novel distributed argumentation algorithm is devised. Finally, we give some operation examples in the context of a robotic application.