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Of Elephants and Men

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The Biology and Technology of Intelligent Autonomous Agents

Part of the book series: NATO ASI Series ((NATO ASI F,volume 144))

Abstract

In the elephant paper, Brooks criticized the ungroundedness of traditional symbol systems and proposed physically grounded systems as an alternative. We want to make a contribution towards integrating the old with the new. We describe the GLAIR agent architecture that specifies an integration of explicit representation and reasoning mechanisms, embodied semantics through grounding symbols in perception and action, and implicit representations of special-purpose mechanisms of sensory processing, perception, and motor control. We present some agent components that we place in our architecture to build agents that exhibit situated activity and learning, and some applications. We believe that the Brooksian behavior generation approach goes a long way towards modeling elephant behavior, which we find most interesting, but that in order to generate more deliberative behavior we need something more.

The research reported in this paper was carried out while the first authors was a member of the SNePS researchg Group at the department of Computer Science, SUNY at Buffalo, and was supported in part by Equipment Grant No. EDUDUS-932022 from SUN Microsystems Computer Corporation, and in part by NASA under contract NAS 9-19004.

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Author notes

  1. Johan M. Lammens

    Present address: R&D Department, Hewlett-Packard Española S.A., Barcelona, Spain

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Robotics Technology and Systems Laboratory, Scuola Superiore S. Anna, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Johan M. Lammens

  2. Computer Science Department, State University of New York at Buffalo, NY, 14260, USA

    Henry H. Hexmoor & Stuart C. Shapiro

Authors
  1. Johan M. Lammens
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  2. Henry H. Hexmoor
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  3. Stuart C. Shapiro
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Pleinlaan 2, B-1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Luc Steels

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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lammens, J.M., Hexmoor, H.H., Shapiro, S.C. (1995). Of Elephants and Men. In: Steels, L. (eds) The Biology and Technology of Intelligent Autonomous Agents. NATO ASI Series, vol 144. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79629-6_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79629-6_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-79631-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-79629-6

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