Modelling the biology behind animal behaviour has attracted great interest in recent years. Nevertheless, neuroscience and artificial intelligence face the challenge of representing and emulating animal behaviour in robots. Consequently, this paper presents a biologically inspired motivational model to control the biological functions of autonomous robots that interact with and emulate human behaviour. The model is intended to produce fully autonomous, natural, and behaviour that can adapt to both familiar and unexpected situations in human–robot interactions. The primary contribution of this paper is to present novel methods for modelling the robot’s internal state to generate deliberative and reactive behaviour, how it perceives and evaluates the stimuli from the environment, and the role of emotional responses. Our architecture emulates essential animal biological functions such as neuroendocrine responses, circadian and ultradian rhythms, motivation, and affection, to generate biologically inspired behaviour in social robots. Neuroendocrinal substances control biological functions such as sleep, wakefulness, and emotion. Deficits in these processes regulate the robot’s motivational and affective states, significantly influencing the robot’s decision-making and, therefore, its behaviour. We evaluated the model by observing the long-term behaviour of the social robot Mini while interacting with people. The experiment assessed how the robot’s behaviour varied and evolved depending on its internal variables and external situations, adapting to different conditions. The outcomes show that an autonomous robot with appropriate decision-making can cope with its internal deficits and unexpected situations, controlling its sleep–wake cycle, social behaviour, affective states, and stress, when acting in human–robot interactions.

近年来，对动物行为背后的生物学进行建模引起了极大的兴趣。然而，神经科学和人工智能面临着在机器人中表现和模拟动物行为的挑战。因此，本文提出了一种受生物学启发的动机模型，以控制与人类行为交互并模仿人类行为的自主机器人的生物学功能。该模型旨在产生完全自主、自然和能够适应人机交互中熟悉和意外情况的行为。本文的主要贡献是提出了新的方法来模拟机器人的内部状态以产生审慎和反应性行为，它如何感知和评估来自环境的刺激，以及情绪反应的作用。我们的架构模拟了基本的动物生物学功能，例如神经内分泌反应、昼夜节律和超昼夜节律、动机和情感，以在社交机器人中产生受生物学启发的行为。神经内分泌物质控制着睡眠、觉醒和情绪等生物功能。这些过程中的缺陷调节机器人的动机和情感状态，显着影响机器人的决策，从而影响其行为。我们通过观察社交机器人 Mini 在与人互动时的长期行为来评估模型。该实验评估了机器人的行为如何根据其内部变量和外部情况而变化和演变，以适应不同的条件。