The Reference Model Architecture developed by James S. Albus at NIST is a theory for the creation of artificial intelligence stemming from work in the field of industrial control and robotics. Ther are three books:

Engineering of Mind is an introduction, and Intelligent Systems is a textbook describing Albus’ Reference Model Architecture (for artificial intelligence).

At NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) this programming framework is used for manufacturing automation and automated vehicles.

Very briefly Albus uses a feedback loop whereby actuators affect the external environment, sensors detect salient data from the environment, then sensory perception organizes and processes the sensed data. From there the internal world model is updated and a value judgment component assigns goodness to the perceptions and then reinforces associated behavior. The behavior generation component computes commands to send to the actuator - completing the loop.

The basic feedback loop is contained in a module (RCS-MODULE) that is a member of a lattice of similar modules. Each module sends sensory perception up the lattice and receives commands/tasks from above. Thelattice becomes a tree to achieve a particular high level goal.

The RCS software implementing James Albus’ ideas can be downloaded from NIST. This code is mostly an infrastructure for interprocess communication. As it is written in C, I would have texai link to it for only the lowest level behaviors.

I recommend the Albus books, especially the Intelligent Systems text (available used) as a ambitious attempt to extend a robotics control system into a generally intelligent system. Texai will be developed as a lattice of Albus nodes, once the infrastructure to support a sophisticated node is accomplished.