Improved Animal-Like Maintenance of Homeostatic Goals via Flexible Latching

Drives and motivations assist in natural action selection through temporarily focusing an agent’s behavioural attention on particular problems, thus escaping problems of dithering between goals. In artificial systems and models, durativestate-based mechanisms for action selection like emotions and drives have sometimes been neglected altogether in favour of planned or reactive control, or sometimes have been based on simple level-based mechanisms. A more biologicallyappropriate and control-theoretic approach is to use latches, however these can prove inefficient in a dynamic environment. In this article we show that making latches flexible through appraisal-based sensitivity to interruption can drastically improve their efficiency. We demonstrate a simple extension of an established action-selection approach to trigger reassessment of the current focus of behaviour. We show contexts in which flexible latching provides advantage in terms of time saved pursuing necessary homeostatic drives like eat, thus allowing the agent to pursue desired secondary goals such as socialisation and reproduction.