Motor planning: An architecture for specifying and controlling the behaviour of virtual actors

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Abstract
As virtual worlds become increasingly complex,task levelinteraction with virtual actors becomes correspondingly important. The control problem simply becomes unmanageable if we try to interact with synthetic agents at the wrong level of abstraction. However, it is not sufficient merely to implement a set of behaviours for a virtual actor; we require some mechanism for selecting and sequencing motor skills appropriate to the current behavioural goalsandthe states of other objects and actors in the virtual environment. In this paper we will describe a mechanism for linkingperceptionandactionto generate routine behaviours in a process we callmotor planning.We present our implementation of the skill network, in which motor skills are the nodes and the arcs represent inhibitory and excitatory connections, including extensions to this architecture based on recent work in robotics. We characterize the domain of motor planning, i.e. what kinds of behaviour can it account for, and when will it fail? We close with a discussion of the limits of our current implementation and work that remains to be done.

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