The paper gives an account of research results concerning a project on creating a fully autonomous robotic decisionmaking system, able to interact with its environment and based on a mathematical model of human cognitive-behavioural psychology, with some key elements of personality psychology included. The principal idea of the paper is focused on the concept of needs, with a certain instrumental role of emotions.

Interval analysis is a relatively new mathematical tool that allows one to deal with problems that may have to be solved numerically with a computer. Examples of such problems are system solving and global optimization, but numerous other problems may be addressed as well. This approach has the following general advantages: (a) it allows to find solutions of a problem only within some finite domain which make sense as soon as the unknowns in the problem are physical parameters; (b) numerical computer...