<title>SAL: a language for developing an agent-based architecture for mobile robots</title>

Abstract

SAL (the SmartyCat Agent Language) is a language being developed for programming SmartyCat, our mobile robot. SmartyCat's underlying software architecture is agent-based. At the lowest level, the robot sensors and actuators are controlled by agents (viz., the sensing and acting agents, respectively). SAL provides the constructs for organizing these agents into many structures. In particular, SAL supports the subsumption architecture approach. At higher levels of abstraction, SAL can be used for writing programs based on Minsky's Society of Mind paradigm. Structurally, a SAL program is a graph, where the nodes are software modules called agents, and the arcs represent abstract communication links between agents. In SAL, an agent is a CLOS object with input and output ports. Input ports are used for presenting data from the outside world (i.e., other agents) to the agent. Data are presented to the outside world by the agent through its output ports. The main body of the SAL code for the agent specifies the computation or the action performed by the agent. This paper describes how SAL is being used for implementing the agent-based SmartyCat software architecture on a Cybermotion K2A platform.