An Improved Internal Model of Autonomous Robots by a Psychological Approach

To realize the autonomous exploration and the cooperation behaviors of robots in the unknown environment, an improved internal model to evoke robots actions using a psychological theory of Russell was proposed in our previous work. The improved model is based on an affect-action model proposed by Ide and Nozawa group whose basic principle is to control the movement of robots by the degrees of “pleasure” and “arousal” of one’s own and the observation of others. To overcome the phenomena of “deadlock” and adapt to the complicated environment, “curiosity” factor is introduced into the basic model, and the action function is improved to be dynamically. This paper provides experimental comparison between the conventional model and our improved model with goal-exploration simulations. The results showed that only robots with the improved model moved dynamically and successfully reached at multiple goal areas avoiding local traps and obstacles in the complicated environment.