Emotional modulation of peripersonal space as a way to represent reachable and comfort areas

This work is based on the idea that, like in biological organisms, basic motivated behavior can be represented in terms of approach and avoidance. We propose a model for emotional modulation of the robot peripersonal space. That is to say, an area both reachable and secure; the space where the robot can act. The contribution of this paper is a generic model that integrates various stimuli to build a representation of reachable and comfort areas used to control robot behavior. Such an architecture is tested is three experiments using real robot and simulations. It is compared with two altered architecture versions. We show how our model allow the robot to solve various tasks, display emotionally colored behaviors and account for results from psychological studies.