06231 Abstracts Collection -- Towards Affordance-Based Robot Control

From June 5 to June 9, 2006, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06231 ``Towards Affordance-Based Robot Control\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. %The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available. Additionally, papers related to a selection of the above-mentioned presentations willbe published in a proceedings volume (Springer LNAI) early in 2007

A review and comparison of ontology-based approaches to robot autonomy

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of reuse, there needs to be an agreement on the meaning of terms. A common approach is to represent these terms using ontology languages that conceptualize the respective domain. In this work, we will review projects that use ontologies to support robot autonomy. We will systematically search for projects that fulfill a set of inclusion criteria and compare them with each other with respect to the scope of their ontology, what types of cognitive capabilities are supported by the use of ontologies, and which is their application domain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Context

This paper develops a representation-theoretic notion of spatial context for cognitive agents interacting with spatial environments. We discuss the current state of the art in defining context as used in context-aware and/or location- aware systems. In contrast to existing approaches, we define context through cognitive processes. The term "invisible geography" alludes to the fact that knowledge about geographic space develops through complex cognitive interaction and is not simply "out there" to be looked at. Placing (cognitive) processes in the focus of our context definition allows for a truly user-centered perspective: conceptualizations imbue spatial structures with meaning. This allows for fixing terminological problems and relating context definitions to work in spatial information theory and cognitive science. Although we focus on spatial context, the approach is generic and can be adapted to other domains in which cognitive aspects concerning users of information systems are central

Chapter 13 Haptic Creatures

Collaborations between entertainment industries and artificial intelligence researchers in Japan have since the mid-1990s produced a growing interest in modeling affect and emotion for use in mass-produced social robots. Robot producers and marketers reason that such robot companions can provide comfort, healing (iyashi), and intimacy in light of attenuating social bonds and increased socioeconomic stress characteristic of Japanese society since the collapse of the country’s bubble economy in the early 1990s. While many of these robots with so-called “artificial emotional intelligence” are equipped with rudimentary capacities to “read” predefined human emotion through such mechanisms as facial expression recognition, a new category of companion robots are more experimental. These robots do not interpret human emotion through affect-sensing software but rather invite human-robot interaction through affectively pleasing forms of haptic feedback. These new robots are called haptic creatures: robot companions designed to deliver a sense of comforting presence through a combination of animated movements and healing touch. Integrating historical analysis with ethnographic interviews with new users of these robots, and focusing in particular on the cat-like cushion robot Qoobo, this chapter argues that while companion robots are designed in part to understand specific human emotions, haptic creatures are created as experimental devices that can generate new and unexpected pleasures of affective care unique to human-robot relationships. It suggests that this distinction is critical for understanding and evaluating how corporations seek to use human-robot affect as a means to deliver care to consumers while also researching and building new markets for profit maximization