Affordances of Animals and Machines

Over the past two decades, robophysicists’ understanding of the physical interactions between bodies and the work they can perform within specified environments, has greatly facilitated the design of environmentally informed robot architectures as well as helped biologists hypothesize environmentally shaped animal designs. This talk is intended as a call to arms for robophysicists to lend their great insights and scientific prowess toward the converse problem of affordances – architecturally informed identification of task-exploitable environmental features. I will present a brief account of work in my lab over the past decade that attempts to develop an abstracted, compositional view of environmental features suitable for reasoning about their possible role as affordances to be exploited by appropriate compositions of templates - abstracted behavioral features of a robot’s architecture. This presently geometric view of the environment would be greatly enhanced by annotations of substrate mechanics whose development has been pioneered by robophysicists. The talk will conclude with speculative remarks on how such a collaborative merger might offer new approaches to the study of animal innovation while at the same time help generate more innovative robot behavior in extra-terrestrial environments that no animal has yet encountered.