Selection of Actions for an Autonomous Social Robot

10 pages, 2 figures.-- Contributed to: Social Robotics - Second International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2010, Singapore, Nov 23-24, 2010).-- Best Student Paper Finalist.Autonomy is a prime issue on robotics field and it is closely related to decision making. Last researches on decision making for social robots are focused on imitating humans’ mind for taking decisions. Following this approach, we propose a motivational system for decision making using internal (drives) and external stimuli for choosing the right action. Actions will be selected from a finite set of skills in order to keep robot’s needs within an acceptable range.We present how our motivational decision making is applied to a social robot showing an improvement in robot’s autonomy.The authors gratefully acknowledge the funds provided by the Spanish Government through the project called "Peer to Peer Robot- Human Interaction" (R2H), of MEC (Ministry of Science and Education), and the project "A new approach to social robotics" (AROS), of MICINN (Ministry of Science and Innovation).Publicad