Motivational engine with autonomous sub-goal identification for the Multilevel Darwinist Brain

Abstract This work proposes a motivational system for an autonomous robot that guides the fulfillment of its goals in a developmental manner, discovering sub-goals not only as a way to simplify goal achievement, but as a way to acquire knowledge in an incremental, modular and reusable fashion. This system has been called MotivEn (Motivational Engine) and we have carried out its initial integration within the Multilevel Darwinist Brain (MDB) cognitive architecture. We describe here the main elements of MotivEn and how they improve the current MDB operation. Moreover, we present in detail a specific implementation of MotivEn and the application results obtained in terms of sub-goal identification when applying it in a real robot experiment with the MDB.