This paper aims at laying down the foundations of an approach to the development of autonomous robot control architecture based on the explicit representation of mental attitudes underlying robot behavior, considered as autonomous active entities. The approach is intended to integrate concepts from the area of distributed architectures and of mental attitude representation and aims at realizing an explicit motivational basis for robot behavior. Starting from an analysis of the evolution of autonomous robot control architectures, we discuss and motivate the introduction of active mental entities in the context of a distributed control architecture. Attention is then focused on two classes of mental entities, namely intender and attender: their main features are illustrated and discussed. A prototypical implementation of the proposed paradigm and its application to the control of the Khepera simulator are then described. A comparison with related works and a discussion of the main directions of future research conclude the paper.
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