En el ámbito de la Vida Artificial, el termino de agentes virtuales autónomos (AVA) es utilizado para definir personajes que habitan en un mundo virtual 3D, y cuya apariencia y comportamiento intentan imitar las de seres vivientes reales, con la intención de crear la ilusión de que ellos también lo son. Pero para que un personaje virtual resulte convincente, no solo debe parecer real, sino también comportarse de manera real. El presente trabajo hace un aporte al desarrollo de sistemas de animación del comportamiento para AVAs, enfocándose principalmente en la animación de humanos virtuales autónomos; presentando un marco general de simulacion para la incorporacion de tecnicas computacionales que faliciten el desarrollo de simulaciones de actores virtuales, a la vez que introduce un nuevo esquema de animacion del comportamiento, el cual incorpora diferentes modulos que intentan emular el proceso cognitivo que genera la toma de desiciones. La integracion de los elentos graficos y el sistema de control de comportamiento desarrollado dan origen a la generacion de simulaciones donde humanos virtuales exhiben comportamientos realistas, basados en objetivos, y motivados por parametros emocionales, estados internos, y conocimiento sobre el entorno y sobre si mismos.

One of the most exciting topics in Computer Graphics is the realistic animation of the behavior of virtual agents. In this field (also known as Artificial Life), the challenge is to create a behavioral system for the virtual agents so that they behave as realistic as possible. To this aim, a number of different techniques have been applied during the last few years. Among them, the most powerful and appealing ones seem to be those based on Artifcial Intelligence (AI) techniques. After all, most of the AI techniques (such as neural networks or expert systems) are based on the idea of reproducing the structure and behavior of the human brain. Consequently, they are optimal candidates to be applied to this goal. This work is focused on describing a general framework for simulating the behavior of virtual actors evolving within a virtual 3D world, and achive realistically to simulate the mental processes of those virtual agents and the application of some well-known AI techniques to this purpose. In particular, we explore some of these techniques and discuss how can they be successfully applied to tackle this issue. For each technique, a discussion about how can it be applied to perform specific tasks is given. We also describe how can some mental processes such as memory, reasonning, recognition, perception and others be realistically simulated by using a carefully chosen combination of these techniques.