Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Researchers studying autonomous agents are increasingly examining the problem of integrating multiple capabilities into single agents. The O z project is developing technology for dramatic, interactive, simulated worlds. One requirement of such worlds is the presence of broad, though perhaps shallow, agents. To support our needs, we are developing an agent architecture, called Tok, that displays reactivity, goal-directed behavior, and emotion, along with other capabilities. Integrating the components of Tok into a coherent whole raises issues of h o w the parts interact, and seems to place constraints on the nature of each component. Here w e describe briefly the integration issues w e have encountered in building a particular Tok agent (Lyotard the cat), note their impact on the architecture, and suggest that modeling emotion, in particular, may constrain the design of integrated agent architectures.