A Functional Model for Affordance-Based Agents

Today's mobile artificial agents, such as mobile robots, are based on an object-oriented paradigm. They partition their environment into various objects and act in relation to individual properties of these objects. Such perception and acting is insufficient for goal-directed behavior in dynamic environments, which requires action-relevant information in the form of affordances. Affordances describe action possibilities with respect to a specific agent. In this paper, we propose a functional model for affordance-based agents. This model integrates an adjusted version of the HIPE theory of function and an extended theory of affordances. We demonstrate the applicability of the functional model by relating it to two different cases of mobile robot interaction and outline an affordanceoriented robot architecture.

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