The Animate Agent Project

Project Summary

The Animate Agent Project is part of an on-going effort at the University of Chicago to understand the mechanisms required to create intelligent software and hardware agents that can work alongside people. Current projects are aimed at building a system that integrates reactive control and purposive vision to support interactive, task execution and human/machine communication.

The Animate Agent Architecture is the basic system design for structuring the processes and knowledge needed for an agent to undertake everyday tasks in the real-world. It has several major subsystems:

Reactive Task Execution
The RAP Reactive Execution System is used to coordinate and execute multiple, concurrent tasks.
Reconfigurable Real-Time Vision Routines
The Gargoyle Vision Programming Environment is used to support the run-time creation and execution of real-time vision processing routines. These routines are constructed according to task requirements by the execution system.
Reconfigurable Real-Time Action Routines
The CRL Programming System is used to construct control processes that can be combined into different real-time behaviors by the execution system.

The Animate Agent Project is pursuing the issues involved in human/machine interaction in two major areas:

Gesture Recognition
The Perseus System is a major project within the Animate Agent framework to recognize human pointing gestures.
Natural Language Understanding
A very recent project is adding a natural language understanding component to the Animate Agent Architecture.

Project Contacts

The people to contact about the Animate Agent Project are:

R. James Firby Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. (firby@cs.uchicago.edu).
Michael J. Swain Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. (swain@cs.uchicago.edu).

Further Information

Further information is available of the following topics:

Personnel: The people building the software infrastructure, visual routines, and task plans for the project.
Publications: Papers and technical reports related to various aspects of the project.
Chip: The robot being used in our experiments.
Publicity: Read an article about Chip from the University of Chicago Chronicle. More newspaper articles are also available.

Funding

Major sources of funding for the Animate Agent Project are:

Office of Naval Research Grant #N00014-93-1-0332.
"Qualitative Vision and Action",
January 1993 to January 1996.
Renewed to January 1999 as ONR Grant #N00014-93-1-1882.
Advanced Reasearch Projects Agency Grant #N00014-93-1-1394.
"A Cooperative Agent Architecture",
October 1993 to October 1996.

The Animate Agent Project / R. James Firby / firby@cs.uchicago.edu

September, 1996