Does it help a robot navigate to call navigability an affordance?

Abstract

Gibson's notion of affordance seems to attract roboticists' attention. On a phenomenological level, it allows functions, which have "somehow" been implemented, to be described using a new terminology. However, that does not mean that the affordance notion is of help for building robots and their controllers. This paper explores viewing an affordance as an abstraction from a robot-environment relation that is of inter-individual use, but requires an individual implementation. Therefore, the notion of affordance helps share environment representations and theories among robots. Examples are given for navigability, as afforded by environments of different types to robots of different undercarriages and sensor configurations. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.