When Robots Weep: Emotional Memories and Decision-Making

We describe an agent architecture that integrates emotions, drives, and behaviors, and that focuses on modeling some of the aspects of emotions as fundamental components within the process of decision-making. We show how the mechanisms of primary emotions can be used as building blocks for the acquisition of emotional memories that serve as biasing mechanisms during the process of making decisions and selecting actions. The architecture has been implemented into an object-oriented framework that has been successfully used to develop and control several synthetic agents and which is currently being used as the control system for an emotional pet robot.