In a joint project with Georgia Tech and Yamaha Motor Corporation, I studied how emotional long term memory could improve the believability and ease the design of the construction of a robot pet.
This work was later documented in an article Ashwin Ram, Manish Mehta and I wrote on Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities:
“Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities” reports work on emotional agents supervised by my old professor Ashwin Ram at the Cognitive Computing Lab. He’s been working on emotional robotics for over a decade, and it was in his lab that I developed my conviction that emotions serve a functional role in agents, and that to develop an emotional agent you should not start with trying to fake the desired behavior, but instead by analyzing psychological models of emotion and then using those findings to design models for agent control that will produce that behavior “naturally”. This paper explains that approach and provides two examples of it in practice: the first was work done by myself on agents that learn from emotional events, and the second was work by Manish Mehta on making the personalities of more agents stay stable even after learning.
Thanks to the good graces of the search engine that starts with a G, I’ve discussed the article in a bit more depth on their blog in a post titled Maybe your computer just needs a hug.
