Informatisches Kolloquium Sommersemester 2010

Montag, 21. Juni 2010
um 17 Uhr c.t.
Vogt-Kölln-Straße 30
Konrad-Zuse-Hörsaal
Gebäude B

On Affordances and Plan-Based Robot Control

Prof. Dr. Joachim Hertzberg
Universität Osnabrück
Institut für Informatik

Affordances as of psychologist J.J. Gibson keep surfacing in the robotics literature as an approach or a metaphor for modeling the essential real-time coupling between the steady flow of sensor data and action control. Affordances in Gibson's sense are possibilities of action for an agent that the agent is able to perceive directly in its environment. Their usage in the robotics literature is correlated with reactive or behavior-based control and with learning approaches on a relatively low level of sensor and actuator data.

In our work, we assume that the action part of an affordance is implemented on a robot as a closed-loop control routine -- this is much in a Gibsonian spirit. Much against Gibson's ideas, we also assume that affordances may be represented and reasoned about, and perceived affordance tokens may be stored in a map. Moreover, an aspect of affordance representations is that the afforded action may be cast into an action description that is part of the action repertoire of some classical planning domain description -- here, Gibson would strongly object. However, in that way actions expected to be afforded in some region of the environment may be put into symbolic action plans and made a robust part of plan-based robot control. The talk will explain the basic ideas, present some demo examples and experiments of its usage, and discuss the potential of the approach.

Kontakt

Kontakt: Prof. Dr. Jianwei Zhang

Telefon 2431