Moving Up the Food Chain: Motivation and Emotion in Behavior-Based Robots

This article investigates the commonalities between motivations and emotions as evidenced in a broad range of animal models, including humans. In particular, a focus is placed on how these models can have utility within the context of working robotic systems. Behavior-based control serves as the primary vehicle through which emotions and motivations are integrated into robots ranging from hexapods to wheeled robots to humanoids. Starting from relatively low-level organisms, such as the sowbug and praying mantis, and then moving upward to human interactions, a progression of motivational/emotional models and robotic experiments is reported. These capture a wide set of affective phenomena including social attachment, emotional behavior in support of interspecies interaction, multiscale temporal affect, and various motivational drives such as hunger and fear.