This paper aims to lay down the foundations of an approach to autonomous mobile robot (AMR) navigation based on the explicit representation of mental entities (desire, intention, obligation, etc.) underlying robot behavior, considered as autonomous active entities. The approach is intended to integrate concepts from the area of distributed architectures and of mental entity representation and it is claimed to allow the achievement of both robust and sophisticated robot behavior. Starting from an analysis of the evolution of AMR control architectures, the introduction of mental entities in the context of distributed control architectures is motivated as a further step in the direction of making explicit the deep reasons that underlie the behavior of intelligent systems. A simple application example concerning an autonomous mail delivery robot is finally provided: the example demonstrates the main features and the potential of the proposed approach in facing unusual and complex tasks.
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