C. Breazeal

Abstract

This paper discusses the role that synthetic emotions could play in building autonomous robots which engage people in human-style social exchange. We present a control architecture which integrates synthetic emotions and highlight how they influence the internal dynamics of the robot’s controller — biasing attention, motivation, behavior, learning, and the expression of motor acts. We present results illustrating how this control architecture, embodied within an expressive robot and situated in a social environment, enables the robot to socially influence its human caregiver into satisfying its goals.