Timidity: A useful emotional mechanism for robot control?

Responses labelled as emotional in the higher animals are frequently portrayed as incidental to the generation of reasonable behavior. Clearly this view is incompatible with the reality of animal behavior as observed in nature, emotion plays a significant role in the generation of useful behaviour. Homeostasis is the product of the interaction of the nervous, endocrine and immune systems. This work views emotional responses as part of an integrated approach to the generation of behavior in artificial organisms via mechanisms inspired by homeostasis. The mechanism presented here employs the concept of a novel Artificial Endocrine System which interacts with an Artificial Neural Network to generate behaviour which could be classified as emotive.