AN ARCHITECTURE OF EMOTION-BASED BEHAVIOR SELECTION FOR MOBILE ROBOTS

We designed consciousness-based architecture (CBA), a six-layered hierarchy of consciousness to link emotion-based behaviors including reflex action, approach, detour to symbolic behaviors, such as ambush with use of media in an environment. The design principle of CBA is that it should have a function/structure that easily makes it possible to reflect the user's own subjective experiences in behavior design. On this principle, CBA enables a designer to map his/her subjective reflection about his/her behavior selection process to CBA in terms of emotion. In CBA, therefore, while the use of objective knowledge about human/animal behaviors is limited to the evolutionary framework of CBA, we follow Husserlian phenomenology to describe internal states of the architecture using components of human consciousness, such as emotion and perception, rather than physical, endogenous parameters. In CBA, a level of behavior is chosen at which an emotion-based degree of the consciousness is maximal, and a behavior at the chosen level is selected to maximize the criterion of pleasure. Model design was tested using two Khepera robots, and ambush with a limited use of temporal and spatial information of an environment was shown.