  Human brain has been used as an inspiration for building autonomous agents,
but it is not obvious what level of computational description of the brain one
should use. This has led to overly opinionated symbolic approaches and overly
unstructured connectionist approaches. We propose that using homeostasis as the
computational description provides a good compromise. Similar to how
physiological homeostasis is the regulation of certain homeostatic variables,
cognition can be interpreted as the regulation of certain 'cognitive
homeostatic variables'. We present an outline of a Cognitive Homeostatic Agent,
built as a hierarchy of physiological and cognitive homeostatic subsystems and
describe structures and processes to guide future exploration. We expect this
to be a fruitful line of investigation towards building sophisticated
artificial agents that can act flexibly in complex environments, and produce
behaviors indicating planning, thinking and feelings.
