Robot Learning Driven by Emotions

Abstract

The adaptive value of emotions in nature indicates that they might also be useful in artificial creatures. Experiments were carried out to investigate this hypothesis in a simulated learning robot. For this purpose, a non-symbolic emotion model was developed that takes the form of a recurrent artificial neural network where emotions both depend on and influence the perception of the state of the world. This emotion model was integrated in a reinforcement-learning architecture with three different roles: influencing perception, providing reinforcement value, and determining when to reevaluate decisions. Experiments to test and compare this emotion-dependent architecture with a more conventional architecture were done in the context of a solitary learning robot performing a survival task. This research led to the conclusion that artificial emotions are a useful construct to have in the domain of behavior-based autonomous agents with multiple goals and faced with an unstructured environment, because they provide a unifying way to tackle different issues of control, analogous to natural systems' emotions.