The construction of fully effective systems seems to pass through the proper exploitation of goal-centric self-evaluative capabilities that let the system teleologically self-manage. Emotions seem to provide this kind of functionality to biological systems and hence the interest in emotion for function sustainment in artificial systems performing in changing and uncertain environments; far beyond the media hullabaloo of displaying human-like emotion-laden faces in robots. This chapter provides a brief analysis of the scientific theories of emotion and presents an engineering approach for developing technology for robust autonomy by implementing functionality inspired in that of biological emotions.

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The lack of a well established theory of consciousness is a major difficulty in the construction of machines that express some of the functionalities associated to them. The ASys long term project intends the construction of assets for engineering any-scale, self-aware autonomous systems. A core element in this effort is the proposal of an architecture for consciousness of general applicability. In this article we analyze some of the current problems present in the construction of machines based on cognitive models and propose a model-based strategy to enhance the rigor of the theorization on consciousness and its mapping into realizations in technical systems.@en

Much is being done in an attempt to transfer emotional mechanisms from reverse-engineered biology into social robots. There are two basic approaches: the imitative display of emotion -e.g. to intend more human-like robots- and the provision of architectures with intrinsic emotion -in the hope of enhancing behavioral aspects. This paper focuses on the second approach, describing a core vision regarding the integration of cognitive, emotional and autonomic aspects in social robot systems. This vision has evolved as a result of the efforts in consolidating the models extracted from rat emotion research and their implementation in technical use cases based on a general systemic analysis in the framework of the ICEA and C3 projects. The desire for generality of the approach intends obtaining universal theories of integrated -autonomic, emotional, cognitive- behavior. The proposed conceptualizations and architectural principles are then captured in a theoretical framework: ASys - The Autonomous Systems Framework.@en

The systematic, engineering-grade construction of cognitive systems with up-to-human capabilities cannot be based on the exploratory programming methods that have populated the artificial cognitive systems effort for a simple matter of scale. We need a strong methodological focus to move from artisany into the requirements-driven engineering methods that are necessary to build systems with the required set of competences in any design dimension (any-x systems). The ASys Vision is an structured vision for any-x artificial mind engineering that is based on a universal conceptualisation of a situated, functional, self-aware cognitive system: an agent that exploits models -of the world, of the self- for the performance of situated tasks.@en