Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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Intelligent behavior in a complex, unpredictable environment
The ability to sense and recognize affect and emotion
The ability to express affect and internal state in familiar human
terms
The ability to respond to humans with social adeptness
Robot as Tool
In the first paradigm, the human views the robot as a device that is used to
perform a task. The amount of robot autonomy varies (and, hence, the cognitive
load placed on the human operator) from complete teleoperation to
a highly self-sufficient system that need only be supervised at the task level.
Consider a specialist who uses a robot to perform tasks autonomously in
complex and often hazardous environments. This might be a scientist interacting
with a robot to explore planetary surfaces, the ocean depths, etc.
Alternatively, it could be a fireman working with a search-and-rescue robot
to survey a disaster site. In both of these cases, the communication between
the robot and the human is very limited (e.g., large delays in transmissions
or limited bandwidth). As a result, the robot must be self-sufficient enough
to perform a number of tasks in difficult environments where the human
supervises the robot at the task level.
Much like an animal, the robot must apply its limited resources to address
multiple concerns (performing tasks, self preservation, etc.) while faced with
complex, unpredictable, and often dangerous situations. For instance, balancing
emotion-inspired mechanisms associated with interest and fear could produce
a focused yet safe searching behavior for a routine surveillance robot. For
this application, one could take inspiration from the classic example of Lorenz
(1950) regarding the exploratory behavior of a raven when investigating an
object on the ground starting from a perch high up in a tree. For the robot just
as for the raven, interest encourages exploration and sustains focus on the target,
while recurring low levels of fear motivate it to retreat to safe distances,
thereby keeping its exploration within safe bounds. Thus, an analogous exploratory
pattern for a surveillance robot would consist of several iterative passes
toward the target: on each pass, move closer to investigate the object in question
and return to a launching point that is successively closer to the target.
Robot as Cyborg Extension
In the second paradigm, the robot is physically merged with the human to
the extent that the person accepts it as an integral part of his or her body.