A situated view of representation and control

摘要

Intelligent agents are systems that have a complex, ongoing interaction with an environment that is dynamic and imperfectly predictable. Agents are typically difficult to program because the correctness of a program depends on the details of how the agent is situated in its environment. In this paper, we present a methodology for the design of situated agents that is based on situated-automata theory. This approach allows designers to describe the informational content of an agent's computational states in a semantically rigorous way without requiring a commitment to conventional run-time symbolic processing. We start by outlining this situated view of representation, then show how it contributes to design methodologies for building systems that track perceptual conditions and take purposeful actions in their environments.