Imagination and situated cognition

Abstract

We describe a novel agent architecture based on the idea that cognition is imagined interaction, i.e. that cognitive tasks are performed by interacting with an imaginary world. We demonstrate the architecture by its application to a subsumption-based mobile robot. The robot's interactive abilities include exploration of an environment and goal-directed navigation within a previously explored environment. Imagination enables the robot to read and make use of maps, allowing it to reason about unfamiliar environments as well.