Assignment for First Spring '96 Agents Paper

This is taken from the second set of course notes, located here

Project 1 (of 3)

Due date: March 1st

Form: paper (+/- 4 pages) (or a demo and 1 page description)

Prerequisites: Read all 3 handouts distributed so far (two by Brooks, one by Maes)

For help: contact Michael Johnson, aries@media.mit.edu

Problem definition :

Design an autonomous agent (on paper) using the behavior based approach.
The agent can be a robot, character in a simulated world (e.g. computer animated world),
a software agent, or a ³smart environment²/reactive room type of system.

Describe the environment that the agent will operate in. What are its characteristics, etc.
Next describe what the goals of the agent are, its sensors, and its list of (parallel) behaviors.

Remember to design the agent in such a way that several (parallel) ³feedback loops² (or S-R rules)
result in interesting behavior.

Goal of the exercise :

Give the students a better feel for the behavior-based approach to building agents.