Real-time Control of Animated Broad Agents

As autonomousagents’ interactions with humans become richer, we believe it will become increasingly important for some of the agents to have believable and engaging personalities. In previous papers we have described Tok, a broad agent architecture which integrates reactivity, goal-directed behavior, emotion and some memory and inference for agents in non-real-time worlds. In this paper we discuss the issues raised when we extend Tok to work in real-time, animated domains. Convincing animated motion poses three challenges to the architecture: multipleprimitiveactions and higher level activities must be executed simultaneously; future actions must be known before current actions complete, to enable smooth animation; and the mind must be fast enough to provide the impression of awareness. Here we describe Hap, the reactive substrate of Tok, and its approaches to these challenges. The described architecture was used for the creation of three agents, called woggles, in a world titled Edge of Intention, which was first shown at the AAAI-92 AI-based Arts Exhibition.