Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

304 robots
Biasing Attention
Kismet’s level of interest improves the robot’s attention, biasing it toward
desired stimuli (e.g., those relevant to the current goal) and away from irrelevant
stimuli. For instance, Kismet’s exploratory responses include visual
searching for a desired stimulus and/or maintaining visual engagement of a
relevant stimulus. Kismet’s visual attention system directs the robot’s gaze
to the most salient object in its field of view, where the overall salience
measure is a combination of the object’s raw perceptual salience (e.g. size,
motion, color) and its relevance to the current goal. It is important to note
that Kismet’s level of interest biases it to focus its attention on a goal-relevant
stimulus that is beneficial, even when that object may have less perceptual
salience over another “flashy” yet less goal-relevant stimulus. Without the
influence of interest on Kismet’s attention, the robot would end up looking
at the flashy stimulus even if it has less behavioral benefit to the robot.
In addition, Kismet’s disgust response allows it to reject and look away
from an undesired stimulus. This directs the robot’s gaze to another point
in the visual field, where it might find a more desirable object to attend. It
also provides an expressive cue that tells the human that the robot wants to
look at something else. The person often responds by trying to engage Kismet
with a different toy, for example. This increases the robot’s chances that
it might be presented with a stimulus that is more appropriate to its goal.
We have found that people are quick to determine which stimulus the
robot is after and readily present it to Kismet (Breazeal, 2002b, 2003a;
Breazeal & Scassellati, 2000). This allows the robot to cooperate with the
human to obtain a desired stimulus faster than it would if it had to discover
one on its own.
Goal Prioritization, Persistence, and Opportunism
Emotion-inspired processes play an important role in helping Kismet to prioritize
goals and to decide when to switch among them. They contribute to
this process through a variety of mechanisms to make Kismet’s goal-pursuing
behavior flexible, opportunistic, and appropriately persistent.
Emotive Influences
For instance, Kismet’s fear response allows it to quickly switch from engagement
behaviors to avoidance behaviors once an interaction becomes too
intense or turns potentially harmful. This is an example of a rapid repriori-