Affordance matching from the shared information in multi-robot

Abstract

Affordances encode the relationships between the robot and environment, in terms of actions that the robot is able to perform. The essence is that each object is perceived by its affordances (graspable, moveable, etc), instead of its properties (color, size, etc). Previous work mainly associates an affordance to a primitive or reactive action of single robot, and the whole task is finished after that action has been executed. However, robots often need to cooperate in tasks such as rescue and exploration, where the perceived information could be shared to match affordances between the robots and objects. As far as we are concerned, this paper is the first one to carry out affordance research in multi-robot. This paper proposes a new definition and formalization for the affordance in multi-robot, and describes a robot in terms of its capabilities which are more affordance-oriented. In the simulation experiment, two robots with different capabilities could share the perceived information to match affordances, and the work efficiency is higher than the non-affordance approach.