MLECOG: Motivated Learning Embodied Cognitive Architecture

This paper presents a new cognitive architecture and its major functional blocks. It describes how the new architecture is related to major trends in cognitive architectures that move toward greater autonomy, motivations, and the creation of goals. After a brief characterization of existing cognitive architectures, particularly those that share similarities with our own, the desired architectural requirements for embodied cognitive systems are spelled out. The proposed cognitive architecture is then presented on a functional level that describes how its functional blocks interact to self-organize and to refine their operations. Selected implementation issues are also discussed. Finally, simulation results of an implemented simplified version of the proposed system are discussed. The simulation results show that the current implementation of the motivated learning embodied cognitive architecture system is capable of maintaining itself in a dynamic environment.