Multilevel emotion modeling for autonomous agents

In this article, we propose the design of sensory motor level as part of a three-layered agent architecture inspired from the Multilevel Process Theory of Emotion (Leventhal
and Scherer, 1987). Our project aims at modeling emotions on an autonomous embodied agent, Petra, a more robust robot than our previous prototype - Cherry. Petra has the same tasks as Cherry. Petra is designed so that she can socially interact with humans on a daily basis in the office suite environment especially on the second floor of the computer science building at the University of Central Florida. She has a given set of office-tasks to accomplish, from giving tours of our computer science faculty and staff suites to visitors and to engaging them in social interactions. Our robot has been equipped with sonar and vision for obstacle avoidance as well as vision for face recognition, which are used when she roams around the hallway to engage in social interactions with humans. The sensory motor level receives and processes inputs and produces emotion-like states without any further willful planning or learning. We describe: (1) the psychological theory of emotion which inspired our design, (2) our proposed agent architecture, (3) the needed hardware additions that we implemented on the commercialized ActivMedia's robot, (3) Petra's multi-modal interface designed especially to engage humans in natural (and hopefully pleasant) social interaction, and finally (4) our future research efforts.