To Afford or Not to Afford: A New Formalization of Affordances Toward Affordance-Based Robot Control

  • Authors:

  • Erol Şahin;Maya Çakmak;Mehmet R. Doğar;Emre Uğur;Göktürk Üçoluk

  • Affiliations:

  • KOVAN Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Engineering,Middle East Technical University, Inönü Bulvari, Ankara, 06531, Turkey;KOVAN Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Engineering,Middle East Technical University, Inönü Bulvari, Ankara, 06531, Turkey;KOVAN Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Engineering,Middle East Technical University, Inönü Bulvari, Ankara, 06531, Turkey;KOVAN Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Engineering,Middle East Technical University, Inönü Bulvari, Ankara, 06531, Turkey;KOVAN Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Engineering,Middle East Technical University, Inönü Bulvari, Ankara, 06531, Turkey

  • Venue:
  • Adaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The concept of affordances was introduced by J. J. Gibson toeXplain how inherent "values" and "meanings" of things in theenvironment can be directly perceived and how this information canbe linked to the action possibilities offered to the organism bythe environment. Although introduced in psychology, the conceptinfluenced studies in other fields ranging fromhuman—computer interaction to autonomous robotics. In thisarticle, we first introduce the concept of affordances as conceivedby J. J. Gibson and review the use of the term in different fields,with particular emphasis on its use in autonomous robotics. Then,we summarize four of the major formalization proposals for theaffordance term. We point out that there are three, not one,perspectives from which to view affordances and that much of theconfusion regarding discussions on the concept has arisen fromthis. We propose a new formalism for affordances and discuss itsimplications for autonomous robot control. We report preliminaryresults obtained with robots and link them with theseimplications.