Dagstuhl Seminar 06231: Materials and Preparation Web Page

Programme

Work Group Topics

During the seminar, we will have four working groups running in parallel. Each group is asked to discuss a particular topic around affordance-based robot control. At the end of the seminar, a short summary of results is expected to be presented to the audience. It would be most welcome if each working group could prepare a short written summary (position paper) of these results after the seminar.

Here is the list of the proposed four topics, which are grouped around one common lead question:

Traditional knowledge representation seems contradicts Gibson's idea of affordances yet appears to be a pre-requisite for the implementation of higher cognitive processes in a robot system. Does this observation rule out any generalization or integration of affordances with plan-based robotics systems?

If and as far as not:

• What about an affordance needs to be represented in a robot, and how?
• Should (aspects of) affordances in a robot be programmed or learned? Can they be programmed in the first place?
• How can (aspects of) affordances be used for reasoning, action, and plan-based robot control?
• How and where in the architecture would attention, intention, or other internal states filter (aspects of) affordances that were perceived on a low level?

List of guiding questions

What is Gibson's ontological stance and is it consistent or inconsistent with the idea of affordances, not only as proposed by Gibson himself, but also in the context of computationally based artifacts such as robots?

Is a functional ontology for a robotic's system a generalization of Gibson's ideas or is it something completely different?

Should behavior-based robotics frameworks be viewed as an implementation of the idea of affordances? If so, is this the closest we can get in terms of abiding by Gibson's views on affordances? If not, what are the differences?

How would affordance-based control go together with behavior-based and plan-based control? Is it complementary? Redundant? Inconsistent?

What would be the benefit of adding affordance support to robot control?

Traditional knowledge representation is inconsistent with Gibson's idea of affordances yet appears to be a pre-requisite for the implementation of higher cognitive processes in a robotic's system. Does this observation rule out any generalization or integration of affordances with plan-based robotics systems?

If not:

• What about an affordance needs to be represented in a robot, and how?
• Should (aspects of) affordances in a robot be programmed or learned? (Can they be programmed in the first place?)
• How can (aspects of) affordances be used for reasoning and action?
• How and where in the architecture would attention, intention, or other internal states filter (aspects of) affordances that were perceived on a low level?

A Selection of Affordance Research Related Literature

Publications by J. J. Gibson

• Gibson, J. J. (1950): The Perception of the Visual World. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
• Gibson, J. J. (1966): The Senses considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
• Gibson, J. J. (1979a): The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
• Gibson, J. J. (1979b): The Theory of Affordances. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, Houghton Mifflin: 127-143.

For general orientation

• Gibson, E. J., Adolph K. and Eppler M.(1999): Affordances. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. R. A. Wilson and F. C. Keil. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press: 4-6.

Interesting papers from various disciplines

• Anderson, Stephen J., Yamagishi, Noriko and Karavia, Vivian: Attentional processes link perception and action. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (2002) 269, 1225-1232.
• Bærentsen Klaus, Trettvik Johan: An Activity Theory Approach to Affordance. NordiCHI, October 19-23, 2002.
• Bajcsy, R. (1994): Do object affordances represent the functionality of an object ?. Behavior and Brain Research 17: 202.
• Borghi, A. M. (2004): Object concepts and action: Extracting affordances from objects parts. Acta Psychologica 115(1): 69-96.
• Chemero, T. (2001): What We Perceive When We Perceive Affordances. Ecological Psychology 13(2): 111-116.
• Chemero, T. (2003): An Outline of a Theory of Affordances. Ecological Psychology 15(2): 181-195.
• Duchon, A. P., W. H. Warren and L. P. Kaelbling (1998): Ecological Robotics. Adaptive Behavior 6(3/4): 473-507.
• Ellis, R. and M. Tucker (2000): Micro-affordance: The potentiation of components of action by seen objects. British Journal of Psychology 91(4): 451-471.
• Paul Fitzpatrick, Giorgio Metta, Lorenzo Natale, Sajit Rao and Giulio Sandini: Learning About Objects Through Action - Initial Steps Towards Artificial Cognition. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Taipei, Taiwan, May 12 - 17, 2003.
• Fodor, J. A. and Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1981): How direct is visual perception ?: Some reflections on Gibson's ecological approach. Cognition 9(2): 139-196.
• Glenberg, A. M. (2003): Grounding Meaning in Affordances. University of Wisconsin, Madison.
• Greeno, J. G. (1994). Gibson's Affordances: Psychological Review 101(2): 336-342.
• Grèzes, J. and J. Decety (2002): Does visual perception of object afford action ? Evidence from a neuroimaging study. Neuropsychologia 40(2): 212-222.
• Todd Handy et al.: Graspable Objects grab Attention when the potential for action is recognized. Nature Neuroscience, 2003, pp. 1-7.
• Heft, H. (2003): Affordances, Dynamic Experience, and the Challenge of Reification. Ecological Psychology 2003(2): 149-180.
• Humphreys, G. W. (2001): Objects, affordances...action! The Psychologist 14(8): 408-412.
• Jones, K. S. (2003): What Is an Affordance ? (Introduction to special issue). Ecological Psychology 15(2): 107-114.
• Lewis, M. Anthony and Simó, Lucia S. (2001): Certain Principles of Biomorphic Robots. Autonomous Robots 11, 221-226.
• Lewis, M. Anthony: Perception Driven Robot Locomotion. Journal Robot Society of Japan, 2002, April 2002 20(3), 51-56.
• MacDorman, K. F. (1999): Grounding Symbols through Sensorimotor Integration. Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, 17(1), 20-24.
• Michaels, C. F. (2003): Affordances: Four Points of Debate. Ecological Psychology 15(2): 135-148.
• Murphy, R. R. (1999): Case studies of applying Gibson's ecological approach to mobile robots. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 29(1): 105-111.
• Neisser, U. (1999): Ecological Psychology. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. R. A. Wilson and F. C. Keil. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press: 255-256.
• Norman, D. A. (1999): Affordance, conventins, and design. interactions 6(3): 38-43.
• Reed E. S. (1996): Encountering the world : toward an ecological psychology. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Rivlin E., S. J. Dickinson and A. Rosenfeld (1995): Recognition by functional parts. Computer Vision and Image Understanding 62(2): 164-176.
• Shaw, R. (2003): The Agent-Environment Interface: Simon's Indirect or Gibson's Direct Coupling ? Ecological Psychology 15(1): 37-106.
• Stark, L. and K. Bowyer (1996): Generic object recognition using form & function. Singapore, World Scientific.
• Stoffregen T. A. (2000): Affordance,s and Events. Ecological Psychology 12(1): 1-28.
• Stoffregen, T. A. (2003a): Affordances Are Enough: Reply to Chemero et al. (2003). Ecological Psychology 15(1): 29-36.
• Stoffregen, T. A. (2003b): Affordances as Properties of the Animal-Environment System. Ecological Psychology 15(2): 115-134.
• Turvey, M. (1992): Affordances and prospective control: An outline of the ontology. Ecological Psychology 4: 173-187.
• Wünstel, M. and Moratz, R.: Automatic Object Recognition within an Office Environment. In: 1st Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV 2004), 104-109.
• Zhang J. (2004): Categorization of Affordances. Dept. of Health Informatics, University of Texas.

Further references

• Arbib, Michael A.: From visual affordances in monkey parietal cortex to hippocampoparietal interactions underlying rat navigation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 352:1429-1436, 1997.
• Bugmann, D. V. and Coventry, K. R.: A method for studying representation of action and cognitive distance. In Bugmann, D. V. and K. R. Coventry (2004). A Method for Studying Representation of Action and Cognitive Distance. CogSci 2004 Papers., 2004.
• Bierderman, Irving: Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. Psychological Review, 94(2):115-147, 1987.
• Cordeiro W., Chemero A., Klein C.: Events as changes in the layout of affordances. Ecological Psychology, 15(1):19-28, 2003.
• Hartson, H. Rex: Cognitive, physical and perceptual affordances in interaction design. Behaviour and Information Technology, 22(5):315-338, 2003.
• Kuohsiang Chen and Hsiao-chen You: A comparison of affordance concepts and product semantics. In Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 6th Asian Design International Conference, 2002.
• Takeda H., Terada K., and Kawamura T.: Artifact intelligence: Yet another approach for intelligent robots. In Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 11th IEEE International Workshop on, pages 176- 182, 2002.
• Lambrinos, Dimitrios, Scheier, Christian, and Pfeifer, Rolf: Unsupervised classification of sensory-motor states in a real world artifact using a temporal Kohonen map. In F. Fogelman-Soulié and P. Gallinari, editors, Proc. ICANN'95, International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, volume II, pages 467-472, Nanterre, France, 1995. EC2.
• McGrenere, Joanna and Ho, Wayne: Affordances: Clarifying and evolving a concept. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface, pages 179-186, 2000.
• George, Maistros; Marom, Yuval; and Hayes, Gillian: Perception-action coupling via imitation and attention. In Proc. AAAI Fall Symposium on Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data in Single and Multiple Robot Systems, pages 52-59, 2001.
• Murphy, Robin R.: Introduction to AI Robotics. MIT Press, 2000.
• D.G. Pelli, B. Farell, and D.C. Moore: Graspable objects grab attention when the potential for action is recognized. Nature Neuroscience, 6:421-427, 2003.
• Vivian Karavia, Stephen Anderson, and Noriko Yamagishi: Attentional processes link perception and action. In Biological Sciences 269, The Royal Society London, pages 1225-1232, 2002.
• Louise Stark and Kevin Bowyer: Achieving generalized object recognition through reasoning about association of function to structure. International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 10, 1989.
• Aaron Sloman: What the brain's mind tells the mind's eye (incomplete draft). Technical report, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, December 2003.
• Steedman, Mark. Formalizing affordance: In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2000.
• Alonso, H. and Simon, Vera and Simon, Herbert A.: Situated action: A symbolic interpretation. Cognitive Science, 17:7-48, 1993.