Communicative Agents for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning Workbench (CoASTeR-WB)

Currently, 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 military and non-military applications, infeasible. To meet this need, we will develop a software platform called CoASTeR-WB (Communicative Agent for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning), and supporting Knowledge Engineering tools, and utilities. We will build on CoASTeR-WB Phase I architecture to develop a mature and advanced version that introduces additional human-computer interaction modalities such as sketch, speech, and gesture using open source and COTS components. We will research and develop advanced versions of perception, spatio-temporal reasoning, and action planning components using cognitive architectures and state-of-the-art AI planning techniques. We will fully develop CoASTeR-WB"s automated test and evaluation framework for assessing the performance of communicative dynamic agents in navigation and extra navigational tasks. We will evaluate CoASTeR-WB with navy relevant scenarios of unmanned systems missions using the Workbench"s own automated evaluation framework. We will develop knowledge engineering and test and evaluation authoring tools to make CoASTeR-WB more accessible to developers and researchers.