Artificial emotions as emergent phenomena

Although some researchers claim that emotion is unique to mammals, this paper describes a notion of artificial emotion as a phenomenon resulting from a series of modifications to emergent behaviors generated by a behavior-based artificial intelligence (AI) approach. Such modifications to behaviors are caused by stimuli (including those from humans) which a robot receives from its environment. The paper describes a series of experiments to generate and test artificial emotion using subsumption architecture (SA) robot platforms developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A “hormone mechanism”, which is part of the behavior definition language, was used to generate artificial emotion. In addition, the action selection dynamics (ASD) paradigm proposed by Pattie Maes as a way to implement computational reflection was also tried. The latter is expected to permit the authors to investigate more profound ontological issues associated with artificial emotion as part of the experiments in computational reflection