A three-layered architecture for socially intelligent agents: Modeling the multilevel process of emotions

Abstract

In this article, we propose the design of a three-layered agent architecture inspired from the Multilevel Process Theory of Emotion (Leventhal and Scherer, 1987). Our project aims at modeling emotions on an autonomous embodied robotic agent, expanding upon our previous work (Lisetti, et al., 2004). Our agent is designed to socially interact with humans, navigating in an office suite environment, and engaging people in social interactions. We describe: (1) the psychological theory of emotion which inspired our design, (2) our proposed agent architecture, (3) the needed hardware additions that we implemented on a robot, (3) the robot's multi-modal interface designed especially to engage humans in natural (and hopefully pleasant) social interactions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.