How can concepts from Cognitive Systems be applied to Autonomous Robots? This research track is being supported by the MACS project, a StREP project accepted by the EC (European Commission) in FP6 within the ``Cognitive Systems'' strategic objective call of IST. The learning and use of traversability affordance on a mobile robot. NEW! From Primitive Behaviors to Goal Directed Behavior using Affordances

Objectives

The main objective of MACS is to explore and exploit the concept of affordances for the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robots acting goal-directed in a dynamic everyday environment. Affordance-based control will be developed as a method for robotics. By interfacing perception and action in terms of affordances, we will provide a new way for reasoning and learning to connect with reactive robot control. The potential of this new methodology will be shown by going beyond navigation-like tasks towards goal-directed autonomous manipulation in the project demonstrators.

This main objective is refined in the main fields of targeted S&T contributions: Robot control architecture, perception, representation, and learning, as far as they are related to affordance-based robot control. A demonstrator, consisting of an autonomous mobile manipulation-capable robot with a rich sensor configuration is specified that will be implemented in the course of the project serving to integrate, demonstrate, and evaluate both in simulation and in physical performance these S&T contributions.

Orthogonally to these S&T objectives, MACS has the dissemination objective to make the different involved scientific communities, possible appliers of the results, and the interested general public aware of its respective achievements.