Conceptual Spaces and Robotic EmotionsAntonioChellaauthorIn recent years, there has been a growing interest
in modelling emotional responses inside the
perception—action loop of an autonomous robot.
One of the motivations of this trend is that an emotional
system could introduce complex decision making
capabilities in robots in a faster and more flexible
way than symbolic deliberative architectures.
However, recent proposals in literature model
emotions at a very low level (Arkin et al., 2003,
Murphy et al., 2002). Briefly, a robot emotional
state is simply associated with suitable parameters of
the reactive behaviors. Instead, emotions may have
an important role at a higher, conceptual level of
reasoning of the robot.
It is claimed that the emotional states of an
agent may be related with its internal motivations
(Balkenius, 1995). For example, an agent has a
pleasure response when its motivations are well satisfied.
More in details, a difference is usually made
between primary and higher-order emotions. Primary
emotions are related with the immediate perceptions
and motivations of the agent. They can be
hardwired or, if learned, they are difficultly forgotten.
Higher-order emotions are instead related with
the long—term motivations of the agent; in general
they are learned during the operation tasks.
In the proposed system, both primary and higher-order
robot emotions are represented in terms of
a conceptual space (Gardenfors, 2000). The system
has been implemented in the autonomous robot operating
at the Robotics Laboratory of the University of
Palermo (a RWI B21 equipped with laser and stereo
head). The task of the robot is to offer guided tours
in the Museum of Electrical Equipments at the Department
of Electrical Engineering.Artificial IntelligenceRobotics2003Lund University Cognitive StudiesConference Poster