Design of robotic behavior that imitates animal consciousness

In order to satisfy need for enhanced user affinity for robots, we are attempting to give robots a “consciousness” such as that identified in humans and animals. We developed software to control a robot’s actions including emotion by introducing the evaluation function of action choice into the hierarchical structure model. This connected the robot’s consciousness with the robot’s action. We named the process Consciousness-based Architecture (CBA). However, it is difficult to change the consciousness of the robot only using this CBA model. In order to induce and change autonomously consciousness and action for the robot, some motivation is required. Therefore, a motivation model has been developed to induce and change autonomously, and is combined with CBA. To inspect CBA including the motivation model, a robot arm (Conbe-I) has been developed with a small Web camera built into the fingers. CBA was installed on this Conbe-I, and the autonomous actions performed to catch an object were inspected. A motivation model of the robot was devised to describe interests for the aim thing of the robot and the desire of the robot. To build this motivation model, we studied the action of dopamine, which added activity to the robot, in conjunction with the incentive to do an action. In this paper described about the expression of the emotion by a robot incorporated this motivation model in Conbe-I. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008