Our agent's sensory systems should believably emulate real-world senses such as vision, sound, and so on, to build a model of its environment, much like we do as humans. Have you ever tried to navigate a room in the dark after shutting off the lights? It gets more and more difficult as you move from your initial position when you turned the lights off because your perspective shifts and you have to rely more and more on your fuzzy memory of the room's layout. While our senses rely on and take in a constant stream of data to navigate their environment, our agent's AI is a lot more forgiving, giving us the freedom to examine the environment at predetermined intervals. This allows us to build a more efficient system in which we can focus only on the parts of the environment that are relevant to the agent.
The concept of a basic sensory system...