NSAIL : Behavioural Sailing Animation Using Constraint-Based Reasoning

Behaviour is a reflection of a reasoning process that must deal with constraints imposed by an external environment, internal knowledge and physical structure. This paper proposes a framework for behavioural animation that is based on the next generation of object-oriented, constraint-based expert systems technology, and applies a control structure of knowledge agents and knowledge units to determine the behaviour of objects to be animated. Knowledge agents are responsible for planning, plan implementation and information extraction from the environment. The activity of an agent is dependent on the knowledge units ascribed to them by the animator. The interaction between agents and knowledge units is resolved by the reasoning engine, and thus, influences the eventual motion displayed. An example given is NSAIL, a pilot implementation using the model-based ECHIDNA constraint logic programming shell. With this approach , the motion for a sailing scenario and other behavioural domains can be specified at a very high level through the characterization of the knowledge agents.

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