Self-consciousness and emotion for a pet robot with structured intelligence

The pet robots require several capabilities such as perceiving, acting, surviving, and communicating with human. The communication is an important aspect for the owner to establish a friendliness with the pet robot. Furthermore, an internal model independent of environmental states is also important, because the pet robot should be seen to be alive. Therefore, this paper discusses the issues of emotions and self-consciousness for a pet robot. We consider two assumptions about self-consciousness. First, the self-consciousness is activated when a temporal change of perceptual information is relatively big. Second, the self-consciousness is activated when the predicting perceptual information is different from the actual perceptual information. Furthermore, we discuss the unit of the behavior using a modular neural network for robotic systems. We conduct several computer simulations and experiments based on these assumptions.