Emotions and Adaptation in Autonomous Agents: A Design Perspective

Why would we want to endow artificial autonomous agents with emotions? The main answer to this question seems to rely on what has been called the functional view of emotions, arising from (analytic) studies of natural systems. In this paper, I examine to what extent this hypothesis can be applied to the (synthetic) investigation of artificial emotions and what are its implications for the design of emotional agents, the main approaches that can be appropriately used to model emotions in autonomous agents, and why situated autonomous agents provide a good framework to study the relation between emotion and adaptation.