Creating and Capturing Artificial Emotions in Autonomous Robots and Software Agents

Abstract

This paper presents ARTEMIS, a control system for autonomous robots or software agents. ARTEMIS can create human-like artificial emotions during interactions with their environment. We describe the underlying mechanisms for this. The control system also captures its past artificial emotions. A specific interpretation of a knowledge graph, called an Agent Knowledge Graph, stores these artificial emotions. ARTEMIS then utilizes current and stored emotions to adapt decision making and planning processes. As proof of concept, we realize a concrete software agent based on the ARTEMIS control system. This software agent acts as a user assistant and executes their orders and instructions. The environment of this user assistant consists of several other autonomous agents that offer their services. The execution of a user’s orders requires interactions of the user assistant with these autonomous service agents. These interactions lead to the creation of artificial emotions within the user assistant. The first experiments show that it is possible to realize an autonomous user assistant with plausible artificial emotions with ARTEMIS and record these artificial emotions in its Agent Knowledge Graph. The results also show that captured emotions support successful planning and decision making in complex dynamic environments. The user assistant with emotions surpasses an emotionless version of the user assistant.