Abstract
Gibson’s notion of affordance seems to attract roboticists’ attention. On a phenomenological level, it allows functions, which have “somehow” been implemented, to be described using a new terminology. However, that does not mean that the affordance notion is of help for building robots and their controllers. This paper explores viewing an affordance as an abstraction from a robot-environment relation that is of inter-individual use, but requires an individual implementation. Therefore, the notion of affordance helps share environment representations and theories among robots. Examples are given for navigability, as afforded by environments of different types to robots of different undercarriages and sensor configurations.
Work in parts done in the projects (1) LISA, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the Framework Concept ”Research for Tomorrow’s Production” (fund number 02PB2170-02PB2177) and managed by the Project Management Agency Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Production and Manufacturing Technologies Division (PTKA-PFT); and (2) MACS, which is funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme IST Project MACS under contract/grant number FP6-004381. The Commission’s support is gratefully acknowledged.
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Hertzberg, J., Lingemann, K., Lörken, C., Nüchter, A., Stiene, S. (2008). Does It Help a Robot Navigate to Call Navigability an Affordance?. In: Rome, E., Hertzberg, J., Dorffner, G. (eds) Towards Affordance-Based Robot Control. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4760. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77915-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77915-5_2
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