Interfacing a Cognitive Agent Platform with a Virtual World: a Case Study using Second Life

Online virtual worlds provide a rich platform for remote human interaction, and are increasingly being used as a simulation platform for multi-agent systems and as a way for software agents to interact with humans. It would therefore be beneficial to provide techniques allowing high-level agent development tools, especially cognitive agent platforms such as belief-desire-intention (BDI) programming frameworks, to be interfaced with virtual worlds. This is not a trivial task as it involves mapping potentially unreliable sensor readings from complex virtual environments to a domain-specific abstract logical model of observed properties and/or events. This paper investigates this problem in the context of agent interactions in a multi-agent system simulated in Second Life. We present a framework which facilitates the connection of any multi-agent platform with Second Life, and demonstrate it in conjunction with the Jason BDI interpreter.

Authors

• Surangika Ranathunga
• Stephen Cranefield
• MARTIN PURVIS

Keywords

• Multiagent systems
• BDI agents
• Jason
• Second Life