Emotion and Action Selection: Regulating the Collective Behaviour of Agents in Virtual Environments
Carlos Delgado-Mata, Ruth S. Aylett · Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agents Systems · 2004
This paper presents an ethologically inspired actionselection mechanism, part of a larger architecture for selfanimated artificial animals (agents) that communicate emotions to each other, influencing each other’s behaviour. The problem of action selection is that of choosing at each moment in time the most appropriate action out of a repertoire of possible actions. Action selection algorithms have been proposed by both ethologists and computer scientists. Models suggested by ethologists are usually at a conceptual level, while those of computer scientists (with some exceptions [3] ) generally do not take into account classical ethology theories. According several ethologists [2], a hierarchical structure represents an essential organising principle of complex behaviours. We have chosen to add emotion to a hierarchical action selection mechanism so that behaviour shows persistence (emotion acting as a short term memory [2]) and to avoid dithering between competing behaviours, namely the herding group behaviour, and the individual behaviour of grazing.