NASA SBIR 00-1 SOLICITATION

FORM 9B - PROJECT SUMMARY

PROPOSAL NUMBER 00-1 15.06-9167 (Chron: 000834 )
PROJECT TITLE
A Unified Framework for Planning and Acting

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
Considerable effort has been put into hybrid behavior architectures, with separate components for long-term planning and short-term acting. These systems dominate the field today, to such an extent that it is often assumed that the fundamental tradeoff in real-time behavior is between reactive execution and deliberative inference. But this division is not justified. Deliberation is not always long-term, nor is reacting the same as acting. We believe we can build an agent that has one mechanism for both reactive and deliberative behavior, and for both planning and acting. This is possible because of three innovations: (1) A representation of planning as mental action, which obviates the need for separate representations and mechanisms for inference and acting. (2) The use of mathematics related to nonlinear dynamics to learn inferences and behaviors as attractors of the system, so that long-chain inferences and behaviors are not random, and so agents switch behaviors when necessary, but not continually. (3) The use of mathematics from percolation theory to ensure that the chains of inference and action produced are dominated neither by short, reactive chains, nor by long, deliberative chains, but by a power-law distribution that produces chains of all lengths.

POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS
Successful development of this architecture would broaden the possible applications of real-world robots and software agents. Two areas where we are well-suited and where we have experience are military simulations and entertainment applications. In the former, DARPA alone spent $33 million on simulation technology in FY 1998. According to the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), the U.S. computer entertainment market is already significantly larger than the U.S. movie industry and still growing.

NAME AND ADDRESS OF PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR (Name, Organization Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip)
Phillip Goetz
Intelligent Automation, Inc.
2 Research Place, Suite 202
Rockville , MD 20850 - 6205

NAME AND ADDRESS OF OFFEROR (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip)
Intelligent Automation, Inc.
2 Research Place, Suite 202
Rockville , MD 20850 - 6205