Towards Agents’ Embodiment in Hypermedia Multi-agent Systems

Situatedness and embodiment are central features of autonomous agents, initially inspired by agents operating in physical environments. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of situated and embodied agents in digital environments. More specifically, we study the embodiment of agents in Web-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Such MAS are inherently open and distributed, as they inherit these properties from the Web, and increasingly dynamic, as they can easily extend to physical environments through the Web of Things. We propose a conceptualization of agent bodies in such Web environments and discuss their properties. We illustrate our approach through a demonstration scenario implemented using the Yggdrasil framework for Hypermedia MAS, a subset of Web-based MAS that follows a hypermedia-based design rationale.