Coglunch - November 10, 2005
"A Cognitive Architecture for Physical Agents"
Pat Langley
CSLI, Stanford
In this talk, I review the motivations for research on cognitive
architectures and describe Icarus, an architecture for physical agents
that unifies ideas from a number of traditions. The framework supports
the reactive execution of routine skills, but it combines this ability
with conceptual inference to ensure informed behavior, and it
associates skills with goals to ensure relevant action. The
architecture defaults to execution whenever it has an applicable skill
that will achieve its current goal, but it falls back on means-ends
problem solving when it encounters an impasse. Moreover, successful
problem solving leads to the creation of new executable skills that
let the system achieve its goals more directly in the future. Thus,
Icarus incorporates insights from research on human problem solving,
reactive control, logical inference, and analytical learning. The
architecture differs from predecessors in its focus on physical
agents, its commitment to hierarchical organizations of knowledge, and
its approach to the cumulative acquisition of these structures. The
framework is consistent with many results from cognitive psychology,
but it also provides a realistic platform for developing intelligent
agents. I illustrate Icarus' capabilities on tasks from an in-city
driving environment and report experiments on this and other domains.
This talk describes joint work with Nima Asgharbeygi, Dongkyu Choi,
Negin Nejati, Seth Rogers, Stephanie Sage, and Daniel Shapiro.
Last modified: Fri Feb 10 11:17:44 PST 2006 by emma@csli.stanford.edu