Robotics and Emotion

Abstract

Robotics studies have developed at many places across the globe and explored many different approaches. Among others, Japan has been one of the leading countries promoting robotics studies, breaking new ground with establishing Human Robot Interaction as an international society and leading the world with very human-like Geminoids. In the 1940’s, Masanao Toda, a founder of cognitive science in Japan, proposed a visionary robotic system to explore and understand the function of emotion as a trigger of cognitive mechanisms for survival. For example, when a human was exploring in the ancient wilderness, fear must have worked as a switch between the exploratory mode and the find-an-escape mode to promote survival. The thought-experimental robot, the Fungus Eater, seeded some of the early AI research when it was introduced to