PhD. thesis
General informations
Jury
- President of the jury:
- Reviewers:
- Marc Cavazza (University of Teesside, UK)
- Jean-Pierre Jessel (IRIT).
- Other members:
Abstract
Many tools for creating virtual worlds focus on the interaction
between the users (represented by avatars), but a few of them let
non-programmers (such as video game scriptwriters or biology
researchers) easily describe the behaviours of the autonomous entities
that populate virtual worlds. Our aim is to provide such tools, as a
toolkit named InViWo (Intuitive Virtual Worlds); this
PhD. thesis lays the foundations of the InViWo toolkit.
We consider a virtual world as an homogeneous multi-agent system, in
which some agents (called avatars) can be partly controlled by
users. Any object of an InViWo world is thus an agent, which is able
to perceive its environment in order to react to events by executing
actions into the world, depending on its internal state and its own
motivations. We therefore propose a generic, dynamic architecture for
virtual agents. An InViWo agent is made of characteristic attributes,
sensors to continually perceive the modifications of the environment
and the internal state, a decision process, and effectors to realize
internal and external actions.
We have furthermore designed a distributed architecture for action
selection, which is based on both reactive behavioural modules and a
generic mechanism for arbitration that combines the decisions made by
the concurrent modules. The dynamic network formed by the behavioural
modules works according to the reactive synchronous model. We propose
the Marvin language, strongly inspired by the Esterel language, in
order to define behavioural modules; an InViWo agent can be entirely
described in Marvin. We developed an execution platform, which has
been tested on several examples specified in Marvin.