Behaviour Coordination for Models of Affective Behaviour
Stefan Rank2011, KI - Künstliche Intelligenz
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Abstract
Affective agent architectures are an important field of research for a wide range of disciplines. Software or robotic agents that can reproduce some of the (human) phenomena that are labelled as emotional have a range of applications in entertainment, pedagogy and human computer interaction in general. In addition, the topic is relevant to cognitive science, and the processes underlying affective phenomena are important, if not essential, for the problems of action selection and behaviour coordination in control architectures of entities situated in open environments. In this thesis, based on previous experience in modelling emotion, the method of scenario-based analysis for the comparison and design of affective agent architectures as well as a new approach towards incremental modelling of emotional phenomena are introduced. The approach uses concurrent processes, resources, and explicitly modelled related limitations as building blocks for affective agent architectures. Rather than presupposing a complex framework, an incremental methodology is proposed. As a key element, scenariobased analysis is presented as a suitable new method to capture the relevant aspects of an affective scenario of use for the comparison and the design of affective agent architectures. This thesis focuses on behaviour coordination as a central problem of an autonomous intelligent agent. Based on a survey of current agent architectures and their scenarios of use, as well as an analysis of recent developments in theories of emotion, the proposed implementation approach is motivated for the computational modelling of emotion in virtual worlds. Importantly, the incremental method of building different executable computational models of emotional phenomena based on reusable building blocks avoids the reification of emotion types and static appraisal frames. The focus of the thesis, thus, is on coordination mechanisms in a concurrent model of affective competences.
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