WOXBOT: a Wide Open Extensible Robot for Virtual World Simulations

This paper reports some activities towards artificial life research. We propose the implementation of a society of virtual mobile robots, able to perform requested tasks while behaving according to their own motivation and reasoning. Each robot is an intelligent agent that perceives the virtual environment via a simulated vision system and reacts moving its own body by driving its own wheels. The robot also communicates with other robots placed near to itself, through a simulated talking and listening (prototypical hearing) system. This feature allows them to communicate with each other, giving support for the evolution of their social skills. The conception and specification of the robots and the environment are being conducted very carefully to create an open distributed object architecture that could serve as a testbed freely available and ready to use for testing theories in some computational areas. Our intention is to test concepts in evolutionary computation, artificial life, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, cognitive neurosciences and distributed objects architectures.