Emotional Behavior Arbitration for Automation and Robotic Systems

Robot-aided care for handicapped and elderly people is expected to be a key factor in future building automation. Teams of specialized service robots shall assist autonomously in tasks of everyday life. To fulfill the demands of this application field, robotic design has to face new challenges in behavioral design. In this paper a new approach for a general architecture of behavior for mobile robots and automation systems is presented. Based on the psychoanalytic model of the human mind, emotional evaluation mechanisms shall facilitate a fast estimation of complex and unpredictable situations based on environmental data acquired by the sensors of the robot. Emotional intelligence is used to narrow the focus of attention leading to a reduction of the computational load, and to improve the cooperative behavior among the robots. In order to show the advantages of the emotional arbitration architecture, the model has been tested in simulations based on the characteristics of an existing mobile robot.