A Generic Framework for the Analysis of Emotion Mechanisms in Autonomous Agents

Emotion mechanisms are often used to perform roles in artificial agents with the aim of improving task performance. A basis for making comparisons between these agents is proposed, in the form of a framework constructed from an analysis of architectural qualities (the agent architecture, the action selection mechanism, and the emotion mechanism along with the emotion model it was based on). This helps to place the agents within an architectural space, highlights contrasting methods of implementing similar theoretical components and suggests which architectural aspects are important to performance of tasks. Three autonomous agents incorporating emotion mechanisms are evaluated within this framework exemplarily, and the extent to which this type of framework can aid future research is breifly