Towards an Architecture for Artificial Animated Creatures

This work presents a software methodology used to implement artificial animated creatures. The proposed architecture deals with dynamics and kinematics issues and provides a well structured way to control the creature resources. Three artificial creatures with different sensors /actuators/dynamics characteristics show the versatility of the architecture."Roger-the-Crab" simulates a crab-like creature, with two eyes (cameras) and two arms. The simulator "T he-W orm" is a multi-link creature similar to an earth-worm. The last platform is the LPR-UMASS articulated "Stereo-Head" robot. As a practical result, by using the same control structure, the above artificial animated creatures are able to perform different tasks, involving the construction of attentional maps of their environments from sensory information and progression on a rough terrain. 1. Introduction In this work we present a new concept, a general purpose architecture used to support artificial animated cre..