Affordance-based human-robot interaction

Abstract

In our targeted scenario, humans can flexibly establish joint object reference with a robot entirely on the basis of their own intuitions. To reach this aim, the robot needs to be equipped with the kind of knowledge that can be matched in a cognitively adequate way to users' intuitive conceptual and linguistic preferences. Such an endeavour requires knowledge about human spatial object reference under consideration of object affordances and functional features. In this paper we motivate our approach by reviewing relevant insights gained in the field of Spatial Cognition, and we discuss the suitability of our robotic system to incorporate these findings. In our context, affordances are visually perceivable functional object aspects shared by the designer of the recognition module and the prospective robot user or instructor. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.