We present Cathexis, a distributed, computational model which offers an alternative approach to model the dynamic nature of different affective phenomena, such as emotions, moods and temperaments, and provides a flexible way of modeling their influence on the behavior of synthetic autonomous agents. The model has been implemented as part of an extensible, object-oriented framework which provides enough functionality for agent developers to design emotional agents that can be used in a variety of applications including entertainment (e.g. synthetic agents for interactive drama, video games, etc.), education (e.g. Intelligent Tutoring Systems), and human-computer interfaces.

We describe an agent architecture that integrates emotions, drives, and behaviors, and that focuses on modeling some of the aspects of emotions as fundamental components within the process of decision-making. We show how the mechanisms of primary emotions can be used as building blocks for the acquisition of emotional memories that serve as biasing mechanisms during the process of making decisions and selecting actions. The architecture has been implemented into an object-oriented framework that has been successfully used to develop and control several synthetic agents and which is currently being used as the control system for an emotional pet robot. Introduction The traditional view on the nature of rationality has proposed that emotions and reason do not mix at all. For an agent to act rationally, it should not allow emotions to intrude in its reasoning processes. Research in Neuroscience, however, has provided evidence indicating quite the contrary, showing that emotions play a f...

We describe a set of design principles for building "Fungus Eaters". "Fungus Eaters" are complete autonomous systems. The goal is to extract and describe in a compact way a large part of the insights which have been acquired in the animats field. The principles have been developed from a cognitive science perspective. Although they represent only a very modest beginning, they make immediately clear what sort of ideas about intelligence and cognition they endorse. They all contrast sharply with classical thinking. Moreover, they provide powerful heuristics for design. 1 Introduction In their review paper of the first SAB conference in 1990, Jean-Arcady Meyer and Agnès Guillot argue that the animat approach will play an important role in resolving some of the fundamental controversies in the study of intelligence or cognition (Meyer and Guillot, 1991). Four years later, at the third SAB conference, they propose three types of goals for animat research, short term, intermediate term, and ...

Robotic Development Environments (RDEs) have come to play an increasingly important role in robotics research in general, and for the development of architectures for mobile robots in particular. Yet, no systematic evaluation of available RDEs has been performed; establishing a comprehensive list of evaluation criteria targeted at robotics applications is desirable that can subsequently be used to compare their strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, there are no practical evaluations of the usability and impact of a large selection of RDEs that provides researchers with the information necessary to select an RDE most suited to their needs, nor identifies trends in RDE research that suggest directions for future RDE development. This survey addresses the above by selecting and describing nine open source, freely available RDEs for mobile robots, evaluating and comparing them from various points of view. First, based on previous work concerning agent systems, a conceptual framework of four broad categories is established, encompassing the characteristics and capabilities that an RDE supports. Then, a practical evaluation of RDE usability in designing, implementing, and executing robot architectures is presented. Finally, the impact of specific RDEs on the field of robotics is addressed by providing a list of published applications and research projects that give concrete examples of areas in which systems have been used. The comprehensive evaluation and comparison of the nine RDEs concludes with suggestions of how to use the results of this survey and a brief discussion of future trends in RDE design. 1

This paper describes the results of a research project aimed at implementing a ‘realistic ’ 3D Embodied Agent that can be animated in real-time and is ‘believable and expressive’: that is, able to communicate with coherency complex information, through the combination and the tight synchronisation of verbal and nonverbal signals. We describe, in particular, how we `animate ' this Agent (that we called Greta) so as to enable her to manifest the affective states that are dynamically activated and de-activated in her mind during the dialog with the user. The system is made up of three tightly interrelated components:- a representation of the Agent Mind: this includes long and short-term affective components (personality and emotions) and simulates how emotions are triggered and decay over time according to the Agent’s personality and to the context and how several emotions may overlap. Dynamic belief networks with weighting of goals is the formalism we employ to this purpose;- a mark-up language to denote the communicative meanings that may be associated with dialog moves performed by the Agent;- a translation of the Agent’s tagged move into a face expression, that combines appropriately the available channels (gaze direction, eyebrow shape, head direction and movement etc). The final output is a 3-D facial model that respects the MPEG-4 standard and uses MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters to produce facial expressions. Throughout the paper, we illustrate the results obtained, with an example of dialog in the domain of ‘Advice about eating disorders’. The paper concludes with an analysis of advantages of our cognitive model of emotion triggering and of the problems found in testing it. Although we did not yet complete a formal evaluation of our system, we briefly describe how we plan to assess the agent’s believability in terms of consistency of its communicative behavior.

This paper introduces TABASCO, an architecture for software agents aimed at integrating results from functional theories in emotion research and insights on the impact of the capacities and limitations of perception in a framework orientated along the situated "New AI"/ALife approach. This expository paper first briefly summarizes current views on the nature and function of emotion and then discusses related current appraisal theories in more detail. A survey of existing approaches to emotion synthesis is followed by a first outline of the TABASCO architecture, relating it to the areas of research in psychology, ALife and agent architectures.

Recognizing and responding to human affect is important in collaborative tasks in joint human-robot teams. In this paper we present an integrated architecture for HRI and report results from an experiment with this architecture that shows that expressing affect and responding to human affect with affect expressions improves performance in a joint human-robot task. 1.

.................................................................................................................2 Introduction: The "Solitary Fungus Eater" .................................................................2 The concept of emotion .............................................................................................3 Definition, issues, controversies.....................................................................3 AI models of emotion ..............................................................................................4 "Reasoners"................................................................................................4 Psychological models ...................................................................................5 An example: FEELER ..................................................................................5 Problems with AI models of emotion ........................................................................6 1. The stu...

This paper presents a computational approach to EmotionBased Decision-Making that models important aspects of emotional processing and integrates these with other models of perception, motivation, behavior, and motor control. A particular emphasis is placed on using some of the mechanisms of emotions as building blocks for the acquisition of emotional memories that serve as biasing signals during the process of making decisions and selecting actions. We have successfully followed this approach to develop and control several different autonomous agents, including both synthetic agents and physical robots.

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