Neurocognitive Affective System for an Emotive Robot

Abstract

For a service robot to be more human friendly, it is required to have various emotional interactions with human. Inspired from both neuroscience and cognitive science, this paper proposes a dynamic robot affective system that can have various emotional states at the same time and express those combined emotions just like humans do. The system comprises three modules: an appraisal module, an emotion-generation module, and an emotional expression module. The appraisal module has responsibility for gathering environmental information and evaluating whether external stimuli are rewarding or punishing. Based on the appraisal results and the homeostasis, the emotion-generation module generates affective states of the robot. The emotional expression module, then, combines and expresses emotional behaviors in accordance with the current affective states (e.g., producing facial expressions). As a result, the robot affective system can generate various emotions simultaneously and produces various emotional expressions continuously, just like human's sequential or parallel execution of emotional behaviors