Real-time emotional architecture for robotic agents

The interest of the creation of robots with emotions has been growing for the last years mainly in the topic of human-robot interaction. This paper focuses in the emotion as a mechanism for the organisation of the robot behaviour. An emotional robot should be adapted in real-time to the conditions of the environment based on its physical (actuators) and on its mental (processes) capabilities. A real-time emotional agent (RTEA) architecture where the attention of the mental processes (thoughts) is guided by an emotional system is presented. The attention system not only selects the behaviour but it adjusts its intensity as well. The flexibility to adjust the functional objectives to the mental capacity makes RTEA useful in those applications where the agent has to perform several simultaneous tasks