Quagents are intelligent software agents that live in a simulated world provided by the Quake II game engine. These agents have basic perceptual and motor abilities, such as being able to tell what is directly in front of them or being able to move ahead or turn around. These basic skills can be used by higher-level control and/or reasoning processes to perform a variety of real-world tasks. The goal of the project is to use the Quagents as a testbed for research into robotics, multi-agent systems, human-agent communication, and team coordination.
We have developed a client-server ``mod'' for the Quake II engine that allows the agents to be controlled by software that runs independently from the game engine. We have also developed a set of Java classes that hide most of the remaining complexity of developing a Quagent. This allows agent developers to focus on the intelligent behavior of their agents rather than the low-level, engine-specific details.