Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
permanent passive goals. Both types of goals succeed and fail in various
ways and both types of goals have an importance level associated with
them. Whenever a goal succeeds or fails, the emotion module creates a
joy or distress emotion with an intensity related to the importance of that
goal.
Emotion-Related Responsibilities
In addition to generating emotions, the Oz emotion module has a num-
ber of other emotion-related responsibilities. For example, it keeps track
of thresholds for every type of emotion. This means that robots can have
a built-in level of emotional tolerance so that not everything in its world
will spark an emotional reaction, but a series of little events will still
be able to generate an emotional response from the robot. The emotion
module also manages emotion decay—each time the control module per-
forms a sense-think-act cycle, the emotion module lowers the intensity of
most of its individual emotions. This means that in order for an emotion
to be sustained at a significant level over a long period, the robot must
repeatedly have that emotion generated by the emotion module. In the
case of hope and fear however, the intensity of the emotions remain for
as long as the corresponding goal is likely to succeed or fail, and it is only
after the goal has succeeded or failed that the strength of that emotion
starts to decay.
How Social Knowledge Affects Emotions
The emotion module's responsibilities also include much of the robot's
social knowledge about relationships, specifically the interpersonal rela-
tionships between robots, how these relationships change over time and
how they interact with the robot's emotions. Interpersonal relationships
are intertwined with the attitudes that the emotion module employs in
determining emotions toward objects, which typically were either hu-
mans or avitars
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controlled by humans.
How Expectations Affect Emotions
The Oz project laid the groundwork for much of the more recent re-
search into emotion modelling, including a robot's estimate of the likeli-
hood that certain events will take place. This feature was incorporated in
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An avatar is the software representation of a human.
