A biologically inspired decision-making system for the autonomous adaptive behavior of social robots

Abstract The decisions made by social robots while they fulfill their tasks have a strong influence on their performance. In these contexts, autonomous social robots must exhibit adaptive and social-based behavior to make appropriate decisions and operate correctly in complex and dynamic scenarios. This paper presents a Decision-Making System for social robots working on long-term interactions like cognitive stimulation or entertainment. The Decision-making System employs the robot’s sensors, user information, and a biologically inspired module to replicate how human behavior emerges in the robot. Besides, the system personalizes the interaction to maintain the users’ engagement while adapting to their features and preferences, overcoming possible interaction limitations. The system evaluation was in terms of usability, performance metrics, and user perceptions. We used the Mini social robot as the device where we integrated the architecture and carried out the experimentation. The usability evaluation consisted of 30 participants interacting with the autonomous robot in 30 min sessions. Then, 19 participants evaluated their perceptions of robot attributes of the Godspeed questionnaire by playing with the robot in 30 min sessions. The participants rated the Decision-making System with excellent usability (81.08 out of 100 points), perceiving the robot as intelligent (4.28 out of 5), animated (4.07 out of 5), and likable (4.16 out of 5). However, they also rated Mini as unsafe (security perceived as 3.15 out of 5), probably because users could not influence the robot’s decisions