Visual Affordances and Symmetries in Canis habilis: A Progress Report.

Abstract

This paper describes the visual system of Canis habilis, a prototype tool-using robot under development. Canis identifies affordances in its environment in terms of symmetries between itself and objects and between objects. The implementation is incomplete, but shows promising preliminary results. The paper briefly sets the context of our research in tool use, based on the study of animal behavior, describes a symmetry-based approach to identifying a limited set of visual affordances, and presents an example of the application of the system to