CogChar - Cognitive Character Software


CogChar is an open source cognitive character technology platform.
Our characters may be physical (robots), virtual, or both.
Applications include therapeutics, education, research, and fun!

The CogChar project is Java based, but network integratable, connecting several other open source projects.
Coghcar provides an important ingredient of the Glue.AI software recipe.

CogChar provides a set of connected subsystems for experimental, iterative character creation.
We aim to engineer a highly integrated yet modular system that allows many intelligent humanoid character features to be combined as freely and yet robustly as possible.
We achieve robust modularity using the OSGi standard for Java applications, although our individual features can often be run outside of OSGi.
Our outlook for Android compatibility is very bright, although we can't control or predict what Oracle and Google will do in coming years.
We directly support networking over HTTP and AMQP.

Cogchar by itself is primarily a set of bundles used to assemble your character application.
We do have some runnable demonstrations included in our bundles.
Here is a spreadsheet summary of our user interface components and Glue.AI containers.

External Features

Many of our subsystems come to us thru another open source software project (many of which are part of the Glue.AI effort). Specifically, Cogchar has the following main external ingredients:

After reading this list, it's perhaps rather obvious that one of the main goals of the Cogchar project is to achieve a useful simulation duality between real robotics worlds in the MechIO space, and various onscreen 3D OpenGL worlds. We seek to do that as flexibly as possible, with the definition of world mappings occuring in the semantic space, with minimal need for software extensions.


(Images of Zeno Robot are copyright by RoboKind Robots, and are used here with permission. Please do not reproduce without permission from RoboKind Robots).

Internal Feature Goals

Technical Summary

The diagrams below provide a quick visual introduction to Glue.AI vocabulary and structure, in some typical scenarios.
System context/vocabulary diagram, mostly sans connectors, accounting for physical and virtual characters in a variety of deployment kinds.

(Click diagram to enlarge)
Process dataflow and threading view of a typical Glue.AI character deployment.

(Click diagram to embiggen)

For More Information

google group name:
cogchar-users
Visit our Google Group