• expert systems
• face robot
• clips
• yarp

Expert systems have reached large popularity since they were born in the 1980s. They are systems which encode human expertise in limited domains by representing human knowledge using if-then rules. Since one of the goals of Artificial Intelligence is to develop systems which exhibit "intelligent" human-like behaviour, expert systems fully find their way in this field.
iClips, the system developed in this work, is an interaction tool for controlling a robotic FACE. It takes its name from the existing CLIPS, an expert system developed from the NASA Space Centre that provides a complete environment for the construction of rule-based expert systems. iClips aims to extend the existing robotic project by implementing the cognitive part of the android through the introduction of a modular architecture which allows the user to coordinate, control and debug it.
Starting from a monolithic library, one of the goals iClips manages to reach is to build a deliberative/reactive two-levels architecture for coordinating the system and having a symbolic representation of our targets and purposes. By using symbolic abstraction iClips turns out to be a declarative tool and, due to this, it can be easily used by hybrid subjects, that means subjects who don't have very specific computer skills: while building a new module requires a programmer, working with iClips requires people who are just able to write simple logic rules.