Communicative Agents for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning- WorkBench (CoASTeR)

Project Description

Communicative agents are those that can interact with human users using natural language, gestures and sketches. This is a critical requirement for the next generation of autonomous agents. However, presently there are no robust software platforms available for developing and evaluating reusable, virtual, communicative spatio-temporal agents. This makes rapid development and meaningful comparative evaluation, critical requirements for both military and non-military applications, infeasible. We are working on correcting this deficiency by building CoASTeR (Communicative Agents for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning-Workbench).

Accomplishments

We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype of CoASTeR with an agent that is able to answer locative questions (e.g., "where is the book?"), move around in the virtual world based on natural language commands (e.g., "go to kitchen through the door") and place objects (e.g., "put the book on the table"). We have demonstrated the feasibility and performance of these agent competencies using CoASTeR's own evaluation framework.