Modeling robot cognitive activity through active mental entities

This paper aims at laying down the foundations of an approach to the develo pment of autonomous robot control architecture based on the explicit repres entation of mental attitudes underlying robot behavior, considered as auton omous active entities. The approach is intended to integrate concepts from the area of distributed architectures and of mental attitude representation and aims at realizing an explicit motivational basis for robot behavior. S tarting from an analysis of the evolution of autonomous robot control archi tectures, we discuss and motivate the introduction of active mental entitie s in the context of a distributed control architecture. Attention is then f ocused on two classes of mental entities, namely intender and attender: the ir main features are illustrated and discussed. A prototypical implementati on of the proposed paradigm and its application to the control of the Khepe ra simulator are then described. A comparison with related works and a disc ussion of the main directions of future research conclude the paper. (C)200 0 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.