Emotion in Robot Decision Making

Social robots are expected to behave in a socially acceptable manner. They have to accommodate emotions in their decision-makings when dealing with people in social environments. In this paper, we present a novel emotion mechanism that influences decision making and behaviors through attention. We describe its implementation in a cognitive architecture and demonstrate its capability in a robot companion experiment. Results show that the robot can successfully bias its behaviors in order to make users happy. Our proposed emotion mechanism can be used in social robots to predict emotions and bias behaviors in order to improve their performances.