Visuo-Spatial Ability, Effort and Affordance Analyses: Towards Building Blocks for Robot's Complex Socio-Cognitive Behaviors

For the long term co-existence of robots with us in complete harmony, they will be expected to show sociocognitive behaviors. In this paper, taking inspiration from child development research and human behavioral psychology we will identify the basic but key capabilities: perceiving abilities, effort and affordances. Further we will present the concepts, which fuse these components to perform multi-effort ability and affordance analysis. We will show instantiations of these capabilities on real robot and will discuss its potential applications for more complex socio-cognitive behavior. When looked through the socio-cognitive window, the AI (Artificial Intelligence) hence the Artificial Agents should be able to take into account high level factors of other agents such as help and dependence, (Miceli, Cesta, and Rizzo 1995). Here the agents social reasoning and behavior is described as their ability to gather information about others and of acting on them to achieve some goal. Which obviously means such agents should not exist in isolation, instead must fit in with the current work practice of both people and other computer systems (artificial agents), (Bobrow 1991). While exploring this ’fit’, works on social robots such as (Breazeal 2003), and survey of socially interactive robots such as (Fong, Nourbakhsh, and Dautenhahn 2003) altogether outline various types of social embodiment. This could be summarized as social interfaces to communicate; sociable robots, which engage with humans to satisfy internal social aims; socially situated robots, which must be able to distinguish between ’the agents’ and ’the objects’ in the environment; socially aware robots, situated in social environment and aware about the human; socially intelligent robots that show aspects of human style social intelligence. Ability While exploring the key cognitive building blocks of these social embodiment, we get hints from the research on child development, such as (Carpendale and Lewis 2006). It suggests that visuo-spatial perception, i.e. perceiving others’ ability to see and reach, comes out to be an important ∗This work has been conducted within the EU SAPHARI project (http://www.saphari.eu/) funded by the E.C. Division FP7IST under Contract ICT-287513. Copyright c © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. aspect of cognitive functioning. Very basic forms of social understandings, such as following others’ gaze and pointing as well as directing others’ attention by pointing, begin to revel in children as early as at the age of 12 months, (Carpendale and Lewis 2006). At 12-15 months of age children start showing the evidence of an understanding of occlusion of others’ line-of-sight (Dunphy-Lelii and Wellman 2004), (Caron et al. 2002); and an adult is seeing something that they are not, when looking to locations behind them or behind barriers (Deak, Flom, and Pick 2000), for both: spaces (Moll and Tomasello 2004) and objects (Csibra and Volein 2008). Once equipped with such key cognitive abilities, children show basic social interaction behaviors, such as intentionally producing visual percept in another person by pointing and showing things and interestingly from the early age of 30 months, they could even deprive a person of a pre-existing percept by hiding an object from him/her (Flavell, Shipstead, and Croft 1978). Further studies such as (Rochat 1995), suggest that from the age of 3 years, children are able to perceive, which places are reachable by them and by others, as the sign of early development of allocentrism capability, i.e. spatial decentration and perspective taking. Evolution of such basic socio-cognitive abilities of visuospatial reasoning in children enable them to help, co-operate and understand the intention of the person they are interacting with. Effort Perceiving the amount of effort required for a task is another important aspect of a socially situated agent. It play role in effort balancing in a co-operative task as well as provides a basis for offering help pro-actively. A socially situated robot should be able to perceive the effort quantitatively as well as qualitatively in a ’meaningful’ way understandable by the human. An accepted taxonomy of such ’meaningful’ symbolic classification of effort could be Figure 1: Effort based taxonomy of reach action 61 Cognitive Robotics AAAI Technical Report WS-12-06