Emotions and temperament of robots: Behavioral aspects

An approach to the control of robots behavior based on the emotion and temperament mechanism is proposed. It is shown that these psychological features can be simulated fairly simply. The proposed emotion-based architecture of the robot control system leans upon the Simonov informational theory of emotions, while the specific features of temperament are reduced to a two-parameter model of the excitation-inhibition type. Experiments performed with mobile robots are described. These experiments demonstrate a set of various types of robots’ behavior: melancholic, choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic. All these types were implemented using the so-called temperament controller, which determines a balance between the excitation and inhibition parameters of the robot control system. An FSM-based model of temperament is also proposed that makes it possible to describe the behavior of an individual. Using this model, it is shown that, for performing certain collective behavior tasks, it is useful to have in the group individuals with different behavior so that this behavior also depends on the individual emotions and temperament of robots.