MotivEn: Motivational engine with sub-goal identification for autonomous robots

Abstract

This paper presents an initial integrated approximation to the complete problem of robot motivation in continuous domains in terms of how to adaptively combine intrinsic and extrinsic motivations into an integrated motivational engine, called MotivEn. It allows an autonomous robot to find goals and decompose them into sub-goals that can be chained to facilitate achieving the final goal. MotivEn is based on an evolutionarily learnt value function in continuous domains where exploration and exploitation, as well as its decomposition into sub-value functions, is autonomously achieved.