A model of a robot's will based on higher-order desires

Autonomous robots implement decision making capacities on several layers of abstraction. Put in terms of desires, decision making evaluates desires to eventually commit to some most rational one. Drawing on the philosophical literature on volition and agency, this work introduces a conceptual model that enables robots to reason about which desires they want to want to realize, i.e., higher-order desires. As a result, six jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint types of choices are defined. Technical evaluation shows how to add a robot's will to its rational decision-making capacity. This guarantees that informed choices are possible even in cases rational decision making alone is indecisive. Further applications to modeling personality traits for human-robot interaction are discussed.

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