A Unified Cognitive Architecture for Physical Agents

Abstract

In this paper we describe ICARUS, a cognitive architecture for physical agents that integrates ideas from a number of traditions, but that has been especially influenced by results from cognitive psychology. We review ICARUS ’ commit-ments to memories and representations, then present its ba-sic processes for performance and learning. We illustrate the architecture’s behavior on a task from in-city driving that re-quires interaction among its various components. In addi-tion, we discuss ICARUS ’ consistency with qualitative find-ings about the nature of human cognition. In closing, we con-sider the framework’s relation to other cognitive architectures that have been proposed in the literature.