Intelligent architectures for robotics: The merging of cognition and emotion

Abstract: What is the place of emotion in intelligent robots? In the past two decades, researchers have advocated for the inclusion of some emotion-related components in the general information processing architecture of autonomous agents, say, for better communication with humans, or to instill a sense of urgency to action. The framework advanced here goes beyond these approaches and proposes that emotion and motivation need to be integrated with all aspects of the architecture. Thus, cognitive-emotional integration is a key design principle. Emotion is not an "add on" that endows a robot with "feelings" (for instance, reporting or expressing its internal state). It allows the significance of percepts, plans, and actions to be an integral part of all its computations. It is hypothesized that a sophisticated artificial intelligence cannot be built from separate cognitive and emotional modules. A hypothetical test inspired by the Turing test, called the Dolores test, is proposed to test this assertion.