ICEA: Integrating Cognition Emotion and Autonomy

ICEA is a four-year project, funded by IST Cognitive Systems Unit. The ICEA Project is focused on brain-inspired cognitive architectures, robotics and embodied cognition, bringing together cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, computational modelers, roboticists and control engineers. The primary aim of the project is to develop a cognitive systems architecture integrating cognitive, emotional and bioregulatory (self-maintenance) processes, based on the architecture and physiology of the mammalian brain. The twofold hypothesis behind this research is that: 1. the emotional and bioregulatory mechanisms that come with the organismic embodiment of living cognitive systems also play a crucial role in the constitution of their high-level cognitive processes, and 2. models of these mechanisms can be usefully integrated in artificial cognitive systems architectures, which will constitute a significant step towards truly autonomous robotic cognitive systems that reason and behave in accordance with energy and other self-preservation requirements. In ICEA we will develop a new generic autonomous agent architecture based on the extraction of control design patterns from bioregulatory, emotional and cognitive control loops based on the architecture and physiology of the rat brain.