The Dynamics of Intelligence: Constraint-Satisfying Hybrid Systems For Perceptual Agents

Abstract

Methods for designing and building perceptual agents should be clean, powerful and practical. But no methodology satisfies all three criteria, yet. Our methodologies are evolving dialectically. The symbolic methods of Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (GOFAIR) constitute the original thesis. The antithesis is reactive Insect AI. The emerging synthesis, Situated Agents, needs formal rigor and practical tools. A robot is a hybrid intelligent dynamical system, consisting of a controller coupled to its body. The Constraint Net (CN) model of Zhang and Mackworth is a unitary framework for building hybrid intelligent systems as situated agents. Most other robot design methodologies use hybrid models of hybrid systems, awkwardly combining offline computational models of high-level perception, reasoning and planning with online models of low-level sensing and control. In CN, the designer specifies the robot's vision, control and motor systems uniformly as online systems. T...