Handling spatial vagueness in virtual agent control

Virtual agents are an important element of virtual environments that enhance their believability and autonomy. Nowadays, there are a number of architectures and languages for designing virtual agents and scripting their control process, but the majority of them cannot cope with the vagueness that characterizes a designer’s description of a location or direction using natural language, and, thus, fail to demonstrate complex spatial behavior in dynamic environments. We propose a framework for handling spatial vagueness in virtual agent control, which uses binary fuzzy relations to represent vague location descriptions and a fuzzy rule-based system for the agent control. We present a prototype implementation and a case study, in which the proposed framework is successfully used for a virtual agent’s locomotion in a dynamic environment.