A Software Agent Based Control System for Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

The software control system for ISAC is described. ISAC is a humanoid robot designed and built by researchers at the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in the Center for Intelligent Systems at Vanderbilt University. The robot was designed for close human interaction with the goal of enabling it to become intel ligent. Possible requirements for intelligence in a robot are presented with reasons for making human-robot interaction a fundamental design constraint. The agentbased, parallel, distributed software architecture used to construct the control system is described. The types of agents and their interactions are described. An approach for using these tools to enable ISAC to learn from its own experiences under the tutelage of a human instructor is proposed. 1 Introduction At the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL) of the Center for Intelligent Systems at Vanderbilt University we have been developing a humanoid robot, ISAC, over the past several years (Fig. 1). The robot was designe...