Biasing Behavioral Activation with Intent for an Entertainment Robot

Deliberate control of an entertainment robot presents a special problem in balancing the requirement for intentional behavior with the existing mechanisms for autonomous action selection. We propose that the intentional biasing of activation in lower-level reactive behaviors is the proper mechanism for realizing such deliberative action. In addition, we suggest that directed intentional bias can result in goal-oriented behavior without subsuming the underlying action selection used to generate natural behavior. This objective is realized through a structure called the intentional bus. The intentional bus serves as the interface between deliberative and reactive control by realizing high-level goals through the modulation of intentional signals sent to the reactive layer. A deliberative architecture that uses the intentional bus to realize planned behavior is described. In addition, it is shown how the intentional bus framework can be expanded to support the serialization of planned behavior by shifting from direct intentional influence for plan execution to attentional triggering of a learned action sequence. Finally, an implementation of this architecture, developed and tested on Sony’s humanoid robot QRIO, is described