Towards Affordance-Based Robot Control

Today’s mobile robot perception is insu?cient for acting goal-directedly in - constrained, dynamic everyday environments like a home, a factory, or a city. Subject to restrictions in bandwidth, computer power, and computation time, a robot has to react to a wealth of dynamically changing stimuli in such - vironments, requiring rapid, selective attention to decisive, action-relevant - formation of high current utility. Robust and general engineering methods for e?ectively and e?ciently coupling perception, action, and reasoning are unava- able. Interesting performance, if any, is currently only achieved by sophisticated robot programming exploiting domain features and specialties, which leaves - dinary users no chance of changing how the robot acts. The latter facts are high barriers for introducing, for example, service robots into human living or work environments. In order to overcome these barriers, additonal R&D e?orts are required. The European Commission is undert- ing a determined e?ort to fund related basic, inter-disciplinary research in a line of Strategic Objectives, including the Cognitive Systems calls in their 6th Framework Programme (FP6, [1]), and continuing in the 7th Framework P- gramme.OneofthefundedCognitiveSystemsprojectsisMACS(“multi-sensory autonomous cognitive systems interacting with dynamic environments for p- ceiving and using a?ordances”).