AAME 

The Autonomous Agent Modeling Environment, developed by Thomas Wehrle, is a tool for designing autonomous agents for use in research and education. The intention is to have an adequate tool that helps to explore psychological and Cognitive Science theories of situated agents, the dynamics of system- environment interactions, and the engineering aspects of autonomous agent design. An autonomous agent is a hypothesized organism or a real robot. In the case of the AAME the interesting aspects of such an agent are not so much the modeling of realistic sensors and effectors but the coupling mechanisms between them. The supported modeling process is a top-down / bottom-up approach. Of importance are on the one hand the iterative construction of the control architecture with an adequate formalism, and on the other hand the interactive instruments that help exploring a mechanism in a free and intuitive way. In iterative or incremental modeling theoretical propositions are translated and formalized into a computational model in a first step. Interactive experiments should allow one to test the behavior of the concrete system, i.e. the quality of the formalization and the plausibility of the underlying theoretical constructs. These experiments may then serve as a basis for further theoretical refinement and changes. A more detailed description of AAME can be found in Wehrle, T. (1994). New fungus eater experiments. In P. Gaussier & J.-D. Nicoud (Eds.), From perception to action. Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press.