Internal Structure of Agents:
We have looked at agents in terms of their external influences and behaviors: they put in from the surroundings and perform rational actions to alter for surroundings. We will now look at some generic internal mechanisms of an action which are common to intelligent agents.
Architecture and Operation
The action of an agent is the mechanism based on concept tools by which it turns input from the environment into a programme on the situation. The architecture of an agent is the computing system (including software and hardware) upon which the program manipulates. On this course, we often concern ourselves with the intelligence behind the programs, and do not be troubled about the hardware architectures they search on. In fact, we'll mostly guess that the architecture of our agents is a computer getting input through the keyboard and acting via the display.
RHINO consisted of the robot itself, including the necessary hardware for locomotion (motors and tools, etc.) and state of the art sensors, including laser, sonar, infrared and tactile sensors. RHINO also carried around three on-board PC work stations and was coupled by a wireless Ethernet connection to a further three off-board SUN workstations. In total, it ran up to twenty-five dissimilar processes at any one time, in parallel. The program employed by RHINO was more complex than the architecture upon which it ran. RHINO ran software which drew upon techniques ranging from low level probabilistic interpretation and visual information processing to top level problem solving and planning using logical and fundamental representations.