ARENA and WOXBOT: Some Steps towards the Animation of Cognitive Characters Acting in a Virtual World

Abstract

This paper reports some of the results of the WOXBOT / ARENA project on artificial life. This project to build virtual worlds was set initially aimed at the graphic simulation of an arena where WoxBots, small mobile robots, can perform requested tasks while behaving according to their own motivation and reasoning. Each robot is an intelligent agent that perceives the virtual environment via a simulated vision system and reacts moving away from or approaching to the object it sees. The conception and specification of the robots and the environment are being done very carefully to create an open distributed object architecture that can serve as a test bed freely available and ready to use for testing theories in some computational areas such as evolutionary computation, artificial life, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, cognitive neurosciences and distributed objects architectures. Furthermore, it is a first step towards building a cognitive animated character.