Emotional Sensibility and Behavioural Control of Real-Time Robotic Agents

Recent research in emotional systems has identified the important role of emotions in the control and the organisation of the behaviour of robotic systems. RTEA is a real-time emotional architecture for robotic agents. Emotions in RTEA modulate the thoughts´ motivation that affect the final agent´s behaviour. An emotional state is reached from the appraisal of a situation of the environment. The way this appraisal contributes to the emotional state and how this state affects the behaviour depends on the emotional sensibility. This paper focuses in the adjustment of the sensibility of the agent. A key point in the process of situation appraisal is the configuration of the contribution functions (CF). An adaptation of a multivariable optimisation method to find the optimal CF that affect the modulation of the emotion level and hence the robot anima, is proposed. Experiments on mobile robotics show that the adjustment of the emotional sensibility produces stable and predictable behavioural control.