Adding Conscious Aspects and Simulated Emotions through Facial Expressions in Virtual Robot Navigation with Baars-Franklins Cognitive Architecture

Human consciousness is the target of research in multiple fields of knowledge, presenting an important characteristic to better handle complex and diverse situations. Artificial consciousness models have arise, together with theories that try to model what we understand about consciousness, in a way that could be implemented a artificial conscious being. The main motivations to study artificial consciousness are related to the creation of agents more similar to human beings, in order to build more efficient machines and at the same time, make the human-computer interaction more affective and non intrusive. This paper presents an experiment using the Global Workspace Theory and the LIDA Model to build a conscious mobile robot in a virtual environment, using the LIDA framework as a implementation of the LIDA Model. The LIDA Model operates a consciousness system in an iterative cognitive cycle of perceiving the environment, shifting attention and focusing operation. The main objective is to evaluate if it is possible to use conscience and emotion as implemented by the LIDA framework to simplify decision making processes of a mobile robot subject to interaction with people, as part of a cicerone robot development.