Abstract
With the proliferation of information and communication technologies, especially with recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, social robots at home and the workplace are no longer being treated as lifeless and emotionless, leading to proposals which aim at incorporating affective elements within agents. Advances in areas such as affective decision-making and affective computing drive this interest. Our motivation in this paper is to use affection as a basic element within a decision-making process to facilitate robotic agents providing more seemingly human responses. We use earlier research in cognitive science and psychology to provide a model for an autonomous agent that makes decisions partly influenced by affective factors when interacting with humans and other agents. The factors included are emotions, mood, personality traits, and activation sets in relation with impulsive behavior. We describe several simulations with our model to study and compare its performance when facing various types of users. Through them, we essentially showcase that our model allows for a powerful agent design mechanism regulating its behavior and provides greater decision-making adaptivity when compared to emotionless agents and simpler emotional models. We conclude describing potential uses of our model in several application areas.
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Note that the agent does not actually need to store all values, but just needs to update the average value in memory when the corresponding action is used.
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Acknowledgements
The research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 713673. Si Liu has received the financial support through the “la Caixa” INPhINIT Fellowship Grant for Doctoral studies at Spanish Research Centres of Excellence. The project that gave rise to these results received the support of a fellowship from la Caixa Foundation (ID 100010434). The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/IN17/11620052. The work of David Rios Insua is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Innovation program MTM2017-86875-C3-1-R and the AXA-ICMAT Chair on Adversarial Risk Analysis. We thank all the colleagues and researchers who gave us suggestions and help, including the referees.
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Liu, S., Ríos Insua, D. An affective decision-making model with applications to social robotics. EURO J Decis Process 8, 13–39 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40070-019-00109-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40070-019-00109-1