Integração Mente e Ambiente para a Geração de Comportamentos Emergentes em Personagens Virtuais Autônomos Através da Evolução de Redes Neurais Artificiais

Abstract

The user’s sense of immersion requires not only high visual quality of the virtual environment, but also accurate simulations of dynamics to ensure the reliability of the experience. In this context, the way the characters behave in a virtual environment plays a fundamental role. The problem that remains open is: “What needs to be done for autonomous virtual characters to display natural/realistic behaviors?”. A behavior is considered autonomous when the actions performed by the agent result from a close interaction between its internal dynamics and the circumstantial events in the environment, rather than from external control or specification dictated by a predefined plan. Thus, an autonomous behavior should reflect the details of the association between the character and its environment, resulting in greater naturalness and realistic movements. Therefore, it is proposed that the behavior is considered natural if it maintains coherence between the character’s body and the environment surrounding it. To an external observer, such coherence is perceived as intelligent behavior. This notion of intelligent behavior arose from a current debate, in the field of Artificial Intelligence, about the meaning of intelligence. Based on the new trends that came out from those discussions, it is argued that the level of coherence required for natural behavior in complex situations can only be achieved through emergence. In addition to the conceptual support of the emergentist approach to generating behavior of virtual characters, this study presents new techniques for implementing those ideas. A contribution of this work is a novel technique for the enconding and evolution of Artificial Neural Networks, which allows the development of controllers to explore the possibilities of generating behaviors through emergence. Evolution without objective description is also explored through the simulation of sexual reproduction of characters. In order to validate the theory, experiments involving a virtual robot were developed. The results show that self-organization of a system is indeed able to produce an intimate coupling between agent and environment. As a consequence of the adopted approach, it were achieved behaviors quite consistent with the character’s capabilities and environmental conditions, with or without description of objectives. The proposed methods were sensitive to changes in the environment and in the robot’s sensory apparatus, proving robustness on generating functional visual cortices, either with proximity sensors or with virtual cameras, interpreting its pixels. It is also emphasized the generation of different types of interesting behaviors, without any description of objectives, in experiments involving simulated reproduction.