Icarus was designed around two main tasks: the manipulation of objects, and navigation. Integral to these tasks, however, are object and place recognition, planning, re-planning, and learning. ICARUS attempts to address these issues with four main modules,
The design of Icarus was motivated by the goal of developing a psychologically plausable information processing system capable of functioning in a complex, dynamic environment. Therefore many design choices were made on the basis of greater psychological validity. This is especially true of the choice to explicitly organize memory as a heirarchy of probabilistic concepts, which allows for the storage of potentially conflicting knowledge, and, produces phenomena such as forgetting, learning, basic-level effects (Gluck & Corter 1985), typicality effects (Rosch & Mervis, 1975) and fan effects (Anderson, 1975).