DPRG mailing list archives: [DPRG] Will's emotions

Wed Feb 28 15:39:25 CST 2007

I have been on a roll in opening cans of worms, so here goes...

Programming "emotions" is not possible.  Never has been, and never will be.

This is more like a "Fuzzy Logic" approach to solving problems where multiple inputs are considered, and each input is
given a weigthing based on other inputs, history, and the programmers bias.  None of this is "emotion" is just a
preprogrammed reaction.

Pete

----- Original Message -----
From: "David P. Anderson" <dpa at io.isem.smu.edu>
To: <dprglist at dprg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 11:54 AM
Subject: [DPRG] Will's emotions

> Howdy,
>
> So anyway, at last night's RBNO Will suggested the use of the term "emotion"
> to describe a level of behavior above the reactive layer of subsumption.
>
> And used my own robot as an example, to boot!  Ah how sharper than a serpent's
> tooth... but I digress.
>
> The idea as I understand it is that "reactive" behaviors are associated closely
> in time, i.e., a can touches a bend sensor and the grippers close, an IR detection
> on the right slows the wheel on the left, a bumper press reverses the wheels, or
> whatever.   The stimulus and response are tightly coupled in time.
>
> The level above the reactive level, which Will would like to call the "emotional"
> level, controls the weighting and priority of the reactive behaviors based on
> long term accumulation of inputs/states/whatever.  That is, the reaction is
> not tightly coupled in time to a particular sensory input.
>
> The example he used was of my SR04 robot going through a sequence of escape
> maneuvers trying to get untangled from some knotty situation.  After a certain
> amount of time the robot is "aware" that it is not making progress, or getting
> too many bumper presses accumlated over time, or whatever, and so it changes
> bumper behaviors to a different response (like always turning the same direction
> no matter which side the bump, etc) in an effort to escape.
>
> No doubt there are these higher level monitors running "above" the subsumption
> layers in all my robots (isn't this Minsky's "meta minds"?) that control and
> reconfigure the subsumption layers.  (This allows, for example, the IR avoidance
> on SR04, which normally subsumes the sonar, to be subsumed by the sonar when
> the robot has observed over time a collection of inputs that "means" it is
> approaching a soda can.  Otherwise the IR would never let the robot get close
> enough to the can to grab it.)
>
> I think I'd prefer the idea of "harmones" providing large-scale coordination of
> simple subsuming layers, rather than "emotions."  Just jargon, really.  But the
> word "emotion" has so many other meanings.  In my own thinking I've allways referred
> to these routines as "monitors" or the more traditional "watchdogs."
>
> Anybody else coding similar emotional/harmonal layers above the basic subsumption
> machine on your robot?  Thoughs?
>
> cheers,
> dpa
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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