A Brain Inspired Architecture for an Outdoor Robot Guide

Abstract

The paper describes the design of a robot architecture which allows the robot to be perceived as a social agent. The pro-posed architecture autonomously allocates computational re-sources to different activities via an evaluation of environ-mental stimuli and robot state based on an emotional model of attention and effort. Moreover, the robot carries out a drama-tization of its own work, according to drama’s theory and its emotions. The architecture has been tested in a project re-garding a robotic touristic guide acting in the Botanical Gar-den of the University of Palermo. This is a challenging appli-cation due to crowd of people, large spaces involved and high noise in sensor readings.