ActorSim, A Toolkit for Studying Cross-Disciplinary Challenges in Autonomy

We introduce ActorSim, the Actor Simulator, a toolkit for studying situated autonomy. As background, we review three goal-reasoning projects implemented in ActorSim: one project that uses information metrics in foreign disaster relief and two projects that learn subgoal selection for sequential decision making in Minecraft. We then discuss how ActorSim can be used to address cross-disciplinary gaps in several ongoing projects. To varying degrees, the projects integrate concerns within distinct specializations of AI and between AI and other more human-focused disciplines. These areas include automated planning, learning, cognitive architectures, robotics, cognitive modeling, sociology, and psychology.