BehaviorShop provides an interface that allows novices with no programming experience to design intelligent agents, yet the expressiveness of its behavior-based control paradigm allows relatively complex agents to be created. BehaviorShop’s features include the following:
- An intuitive, natural language-based agent creation interface
- Interactive design and testing of agents in a 3-D virtual environment
- Drag-and-drop reordering of behavior layers in the agent architecture
- UI feedback elements to enhance usability
- Multiple conditions and/or actions in a single behavior layer
Natural Language-Based Interface
BehaviorShop users define an agent’s actions using a guided natural language interface, meaning that no programming experience is necessary in order to create interesting intelligent agents with BehaviorShop. The condition(s) and action(s) associated with a particular behavior layer of an agent are selected incrementally from a series of drop-down boxes. Thus a user may select the condition “sees a person” or continue to add more detail to make the condition more specific such as “sees a person within arm’s reach.” Similarly, the actions available to the agent are presented in English, such as “shop at the market” or “request an ambulance.”
Interactive Design & Test
By integrating with the BEHAVEngine for controlling agents and the FI3RST game environment, BehaviorShop allows users to incrementally build and test agents. Since the user can readily see how the agent actually performs, troubleshooting agent design errors becomes much easier. For example, the user may have inadvertently defined a particular behavior in a way that overrides all of the agent’s other behaviors; when the agent behaves unexpectedly, the user can easily modify the agent architecture and re-test until the desired performance is seen.
Drag & Drop Layer Reordering
From the behavior-based control editing screen, users can rearrange the priority of each of the agent’s behaviors simply by moving the layers around with the drag & drop interface.
UI Feedback Elements
Because the behavior editing interface allows conditions and actions to be built up incrementally, users may have to select from several drop-down boxes before a valid behavior is created. However, users may continue to make a behavior more specific as desired. Therefore, BehaviorShop incorporates feedback elements to indicate to the user when a condition or action selection represents a well-formed statement. Until a valid statement is formed, a red stop sign icon appears next to each trigger condition or action being specified. When a valid statement has been formed and the user may save the completed behavior description, the stop sign icon changes to display a green check mark.
Compound Conditions & Actions
Moving beyond simple conditions and actions, BehaviorShop allows users to design agent behaviors involving multiple compound statements. For trigger conditions, up to three separate statements can be combined using “and” or “or”; for example, a particular behavior could have the compound condition “sees a person” and “is at the market”, which would not activate until the agent sees a person while at the market. Similarly, compound actions can be created by specifying that up to three actions should occur either simultaneously (using “and”) or in sequence (using “then”), for example, “say ‘hello’” then “walk to the market shack.”
