Affordance Maps

We have come up with an overarching theme for my past, present, and future research: affordance maps. In terms of interacting with the physical world, objects afford certain actions. A common example is that a chair affords sitting. In computer vision, classifying a chair is a difficult problem, because chairs have highly varied form. For any object that affords sitting, saying that the object is a chair is quite likely not completely wrong, even if it isn't the best answer. For example, a table affords sitting, so it could be classified as a chair. Such an answer might get a chuckle out of another person, but only because it's a somewhat unusual answer, and not entirely wrong.

In this sense we can see that most objects afford many actions, and some actions are afforded by several things. A chair affords sitting, standing, pushing, pounding, kicking, etc. Throwing is afforded by almost all objects, at least for some person or machine (most people cannot throw a car, but a construction crane could). Any object will have an affordance ranking or preference pattern. For a cup, this might be drinking, pouring, drumming, trapping insects, in order from highest to lowest preference.

Extending this idea, we can consider the notion of social affordances. That is, given the current state of the world, what social actions are permitted or acceptable? Discovering this kind of thing automatically is certainly daunting, and the only idea I have so far is to classify human social actions then study and learn from humans interacting with each other and with the robot.